


Cruelson's Heresy (The Ballad of Lost C'Tasha)

by MotherInLore



Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [13]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Animal people, Blanket Instrumentality Weirdness, Body Modification, Catgirl Natasha, F/M, Fantastic Racism, I started this as a Lost C'mell fixit but YMMV, Lots of MCU cameos, Politics, Racism, Slavery, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:29:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28617330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: "The task of your life and your lineage shall be to solve the problem of the underpeople."Somehow, he doesn't think Phillips had any ofthisin mind.
Relationships: Phil Coulson/Natasha Romanov
Series: So, I Guess my Muse wants Marvel, now... [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1007676
Kudos: 2





	1. A Meeting of Powers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're here from MCU, you can ignore this: it won't help the story make any sense. If you're here from Instrumentality, you know that nothing makes sense anyway and you can read on if you're curious.
> 
> So, at the very beginning of writing this thing, I was going to stick to Instrumentality canon and set this story sometime in the period between "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," making the Lord Jestocost character one of the six previous to _The_ Jestocost, and assume that there had been multiple C'Mells, as there had been multiple D'Joans. (As well as I can figure it, the timeline between "Alpha Ralpha" and "Lost C'Mell is such that there would _have_ to be multiple C'Mells, or else C'Mell has some personal experience when she tells Rodd McBan that she's afraid of stroon. But I digress.) 
> 
> ANyway, I was all set up to write my bittersweet tragedy and then keravon pointed out that Tony Stark would absolutely be the Planet Buyer in an MCU fusion and at that point I said, screw it, I'm gonna treat both canons like Holy scripture and quote the bits I like out of context and ignore the rest of it.

I

The High Lord Judges of the Instrumentality often went mad, at the end. It was only to be expected when, alone among Humanity, they bore the duty to witness and remember wrongness, pain, untidiness – to witness, remember, and correct. Remembrance was otherwise a punishment issued only to the most egregious of criminals, suffering though their eternities on the prison planet Shayol. The irony escaped no one.

It was for this reason above others that the High Lords required such mental strength of themselves. It was true that a Judge might be required, in the course of their duties, to spiek to whole cities at once, to subdue the wildest and most disorderly of minds, to submerge in, and reprogram, the most delusional of heretics. But most of all, they must remember, and remember without breaking. Before his or her first dose of stroon, before they first spieked to anyone of a lower-order designation, long, long before they made any binding judgments, a fledgling High Lord learned to tidy their own mind, to sort their emotions into those worth keeping and those that should be obliterated, to those which should be recorded into _testaments,_ verbal accounts of opinions and thoughts, included with the photographic and written records digitally remembered for later study at some level of emotional distance, and some few, very few, that a High Lord might spiek directly to a successor, mind-to-mind, with all the things that words could never wholly encompass.

The High Lord Philips had only one set of memories in this last category, one long, agonizing set, and he chose to spiek them when his chosen successor was, from the point of view of the rest of the Instrumentality, horribly young. And yet, who among the peaceable masses of Humanity, moved by the tides of loneliness to spiek even their tiny discontents to their chosen lovers, who could blame Lord Philips for feeling pressed to share his great burden? For it was High Lord Philips, remember, who oversaw the outcome of the Azzano Crusade, who investigated every chain in the link of events that led to the martyrdom of D’Steve and his little group of underpeople and had to decide what to do about it all. All the Lords of the Instrumentality, and later every educated person everywhere, saw the video footage and read the reports, but Philips was the one who had to track the memories of the lazy, feckless embryo programmer whose idleness led to the birth of poor, frustrated Peggy, a name on a planet of numbers, gifted with a colonist’s drive to heal, fix, improve, endure, and cursed with a settled planet that had less than no need for any such drive. Philips was the one, at the last, who had to soothe the many, many numbered citizens whose minds had been seared by the touch of the golden dog-man, D’Steve, as, dying, he dared to spiek, sending his heretical telepathic message out to a range unreachable even for most truepeople: _we love you, our love is the same as yours, you can feel it, and we love you._ Philips had to bear that. And he had to bear the duty of editing Peggy’s memories afterward, and those of the Hunter, later called Souza, who had helped her, so that the embryo programmer’s errors would not haunt them, so their love and companionship would not be injured when they were reassigned in more appropriate roles in a different solar system. Philips had to bear all of that, too.

It is no wonder, then, that Philips was so exacting with his mentee. “I have named you Cruelson,” Philips told this youth, “because you must remember, always, the cruelty that is built into the Instrumentality, that is needed to maintain the golden order and serenity that we all enjoy. And whatever else you accomplish in your time of Lordship, the great task of your life and your lineage will be to solve the problem of the underpeople.” 

II

In Philips’ Cruelson’s Chiefdom, and the early years of his Lordship, he was noted less for any remarkable decisions than for the exemplary tidiness and discipline of his mind. He seemed to know, as if by instinct, which of the little, wearying cases under his purview must be remembered in order to further refine his judgment and abilities and which must be erased, lest they erode his sense of compassion and morality and leave him jaded and corrupt, unable to hear the pleas of the numbers over the power of his own spieking.

He first made a name for himself, instead of for his mentor, in the case which was also the first he made a _testament_ for: that of L’Oki, created by the mad Norstrilian stroon rancher Odin and raised to believe himself a trueman, Odin’s younger son, when in fact he was a mere cub, a lionman raised among his betters. The poor creature had even been dosed with stroon alongside his trueman brother, a waste inconceivable anywhere but Norstrilia and obscene even there. Cruelson’s investigations uncovered a plot between Odin and the Titan Consortium which could have contaminated the entire stroon harvest, leaving nearly half the Instrumentality resistant to the drug and sentenced, thereby, to a pathetic and unpredictable lifespan of a century or even less, the first incurable illness to afflict Humanity in nearly five thousand years. All this guaranteed a place in the Records of Judgment, but it was Cruelson’s order that ensured that L’Oki’s history was documented in full, rather than in summary.

Perhaps this Judgment was the one that caught the attention of other eyes, watching from the depths, rather than the heights, and making plans that the Instrumentality knew nothing of and would have denied the possibility of there being anything to know. Perhaps not. The powers and fates that moved C’Tasha to come to High Lord Judge Cruelson when and how she did told her very little of _why._ She fell in love without knowing anything of his history at all.

III

C’Tasha was a girlygirl, of cat derivation. She was, by the standards of the underpeople, where the phrase has strict genetic connotations, well-bred, being in fact a daughter of the famous athlete (and infamous spy, though very, very few were aware of this at the time) C’Yasha. Had she been a truewoman, she would perhaps have been called well-bred in the other, behavioral sense, because her job required of her manners and perceptiveness of a very high order indeed, and if she failed, she would, of course, have been mercifully disposed of. Nonetheless, she was a cat. Nothing in her genetics, nothing in the dire protocols of the red rooms of TAJHITI, where her body and mind were honed to maximum usefulness in her assigned role, nothing that went into making C’Tasha what she was should have enabled her to do what she did. She was a girlygirl, and she went up against the assembled High Lords of the Instrumentality. Behind her, in support, she had a few well-kept secrets, an eccentric or two. Behind them, they had the full weight of millennia of law and training and slowly accreted power, the sharpest, oldest minds in all the known universe. It should not have happened, and doubtless will not happen again, but she went up against them, and she _won._

The setting for this victory was the Triskelion: greatest of ships, smallest of cities, in geosynchronous orbit with the Manhome principality of Dee-See, hovering twenty-five kilometers above it like a permanent raincloud, or a patient vulture whose prey had not yet stopped moving. 

Lord Cruelson had an office near the fourth engine.

Cruelson liked the natural sunlight, even in the searing intensities the viewports admitted, so much more direct than through Manhome’s prismatic, moist, lower atmosphere. For this reason, he had no difficulties in keeping the office and apartments he had selected, not even in the early days of his lordship. Many of his colleagues found his outright rejection of such comforts as tuneable holo-views of scenic landscapes from other planets to be morbid. But his eccentric fondness for the vertiginous swirls of the high clouds far below him, that hid and revealed the battered continent Yusa as the winds blew them across, to say nothing of his tolerance of the black, spangled void that no one had entered since the age of Sailors, preferring to fold it out of the way in luxurious planoform ships when one must travel at all, all of this meant Cruelson had plenty of space to work.

His main office was some twenty meters wide, ten meters high, sixty meters deep, and his private apartments nearly twice that. Behind them both churned the fourth engine, its coils encompassing nearly a thousand hectares. But big as it was, Cruelson’s private space was a mere pigeonhole in the muffler on the rim of the Triskelion.

The Triskelion had been built during mankind’s biggest mechanical splurge. In the early days of space exploration, ship construction had required stone-melting heat, dangerously toxic alloys, chemical and nuclear reactions that would have obliterated any earthly base of operations. The Daimoni—people of Earth extraction, who came back from somewhere beyond the stars—had helped men build their airborne industrial center of weatherproof, rustproof, time-proof, stressproof material, powered by the sun and wind and needing little other fuel. Then the Daimoni had gone away and had never come back. 

Since then, the needs of the shipbuilders had changed beyond recognition, and the echoing spaces of the Triskelion had been colonized by other purposes. Cruelson often looked around his apartment and wondered what it had been like, when the robot nozzles fired streams of plasma through this chamber and sixty-four others like it, out into the blackness where the inimical crystals grew and ramified into the great, tissue metal sails, insubstantial yet coherent, thousands of kilometers across, that once upon a time pushed the striving and the feckless across the stars.

Now, solid timber walls and library screens and a goodly number of ostentatious bookshelves divided the space, and the plasma nozzles served only as nesting spots for feral canarikeets and other small creatures. Nobody needed that much space anymore. Planoforming ships still landed at the Triskelion as a matter of legal convenience, and undertook their subtle and arcane repairs in spaces not accessible to the unmodified human mind. Certainly there were no more roaring gouts of superheated flame upsetting any weather patterns.

Philips’ Cruelson looked out and down at the swirling clouds and the piercing bright lance of the sun, just above them, and talked to himself. “Nice day, good air, no trouble, better eat.”

Cruelson often talked to himself like that, simultaneously nudging his orderly mind into its set paths and hearing the voice of the only person nearby who understood what he was up to – himself. He was an individual – still a difficult undertaking even on a planet where most humans had names rather than numbers – almost an eccentric. He had, for instance, a Lichtenstein print above his bed featuring the ancient mythological hero of Captain Amrika; the only one known to exist, just as Cruelson was likely the only one on or above the world who might appreciate a Lichtenstein, or who had heard of Captain Amrika. He had the tapestries of a forgotten empire hanging from his back wall. Every morning the sun played a grand opera for him, muting and lighting and shifting the colors so that he could almost imagine that the old days of quarrel, murder and high drama had come back to Earth again. He had a copy of Shakespeare, a copy of Pepys, and two pages of the Book of Ecclesiastes in a locked box beside his bed. Only forty-two people in the universe could read Ancient English, and he was one of them. He drank coffee, which he had made by his own robots in his own berry plantation on the South Sunset coast. He was a man, in short, who had arranged his own life to live comfortably, selfishly and well on the personal side, so that he could give generously and impartially of his talents on the official side.

When he awoke on this particular morning, he had no idea that a beautiful girl was about to fall hopelessly in love with him—that he would find, after a hundred years and more of experience in government, another government on Earth just as strong and almost as ancient as his own—that he would willingly fling himself into conspiracy and danger for a cause which he only half understood. All these things were mercifully hidden from him by time, so that his only question on arising was, should he or should he not have a small cup of coffee with his breakfast. On the 173rd day of each year, he always made a point of eating eggs. They were a rare treat, and he did not want to spoil himself by having too many, nor to deprive himself and forget a pleasure by having none at all. And their flavor was delicate; the coffee might overwhelm it, perhaps. Or the scent might enhance the eggs if he refrained from drinking it until aftwerward…. He puttered around the room, muttering, "Coffee? Coffee?" 

C’Tasha was coming into his life, but he did not know it. She was fated to win. That part, she herself did not know.

IV

Most of the few truepeople who bothered with such things would say the problem of the underpeople dated from the Rediscovery of Man, from that thrilling and disorienting period when, after thousands of years of sameness, the Instrumentality chose to revive such archaic and inconvenient traditions as, money, newspapers, national languages, sickness and the occasional (carefully monitored and calibrated) unexpected death. It was still very early, you must remember. The Howling Crusaders of Azzano, martyred D’Steve and his faithful companion, the Bison-man B’James, nobody remembered very much about them at all, save those Lords of the Instrumentality who had been privileged and condemned to remember. The great mural painting of D’Steve’s drowning did not yet hang in the public square of Meeya-Meefla. The discovery of the robot run by the laminated brain of B’James and containing, sacrilegiously (which took some work, in the absence of any religion), an imprint of his personality and memories as if he were a valued trueman – that was nearly a century in the future still – a quarter of a lifetime away, for most. Two or three lifetimes away for most of the underpeople. Until the Rediscovery, until true humans for the first time in a long, endless time, knew firsthand the electrifying thrill of being frustrated, thwarted, shaped by opposing forces, the underpeople were completely unnoticed and thus could hardly be a problem.

But with the Rediscovery, there came to be a greater possibility of sympathy between the kinds of people that inhabited old Manhome. And hence, the problem of the underpeople became a concept understandable to others beyond Philips’ Cruelson, who had had a horrible memory spieked to him much, much too young. 

The underpeople were not human – they were created from the stock of various manhome animals, to suit the many and varied purposes that required more adaptability than the most cleverly trained robot, yet required too much discipline or misery or tedium to inflict upon one of the tidy, happy citizens of the Instrumentality. They were humanly shaped, roughly, depending on their assigned jobs, because it was more convenient to have tools designed for a standard range of bodies, to have only one kind of throat speaking words of one kind of language. They could speak, sing, read, write, work, and die (and love, though that was nearly forbidden to mention and certainly not be taken into account), but they were not covered by human law, which simply defined them as “homunculi” and gave them a status similar to slaves or robots. Real people from the distant planets, however strange their bodies, were always called “homonids.”

Most of the underpeople did their jobs and accepted their half-slave status without question. Some became famous—C'Yasha had been the first earth-being to manage a thousand-meter broad-jump under normal gravity. His picture was seen in a thousand worlds. His daughter, C'Tasha, was a girlygirl, earning her living by welcoming human beings and hominids from the out-worlds and making them feel at home when they reached Earth. She had the privilege of working at the Triskelion, but she had the duty of working very hard for a living which did not pay well. Human beings and hominids had lived so long in an affluent society that they did not know what it meant to be poor. But the Lords of the Instrumentality had decreed that underpeople—derived from animal stock—should live under the economics of the Ancient World; they had to have their own kind of money to pay for their rooms, their food, their possessions and the education of their children. If they became bankrupt, they went to the Poorhouse, where they were killed painlessly by means of gas. 

It was evident that humanity, having settled all of its own basic problems, was not quite ready to let Earth animals, no matter how much they might be changed, assume a full equality with man. No human had imagined that an underperson might have time or room or leftover brainpower to attend to matters outside their punishing labors, and so did not see the gaps the strictures did not fill, and so did not imagine what the underpeople might invent to fill them. The underpeople, were, by policy and law, inferior, and that was that. There was no need to identify other standards of measurement to prove it.

The Lord Cruelson opposed this policy. He was a man who had little love, no fear, freedom from ambition and a dedication to his job: but there are passions of government as deep and challenging as the emotions of love. Two hundred years of thinking himself right and of being outvoted had instilled in Cruelson a furious desire to get things done his own way.

He was one of the few true men who believed in the rights of the underpeople. He did not think that mankind would ever get around to correcting ancient wrongs unless the underpeople themselves had some of the tools of power—weapons, conspiracy, wealth and (above all) organization with which to challenge man. (They had many of those tools already, were learning to use them. But Cruelson wanted them to have the tools without needing to hide them.) He was not afraid of revolt, but he thirsted for justice with an obsessive yearning which overrode all other considerations. When the Lords of the Instrumentality heard that there was the rumor of a conspiracy among the underpeople, they left it to the robot police to ferret out.

Cruelson did not.

He set up his own network of informants, using underpeople themselves for the purpose, hoping that patient and fair treatment of the young and bribable would eventually bring him to the attention of the leadership of the underpeople as, not to get too optimistic, at least a friendly enemy, if not an actual ally.

If those leaders existed (and Cruelson assumed they did,) they were clever. What sign did a girlygirl like C’Tasha give of being the spearhead of a criss-cross of agents that had penetrated the Triskelion itself? They must, assuming they existed, be very, very careful. The telepathic monitors, both robotic and human, kept every thought band under surveillance, by random sampling. But even those computers found nothing more significant than improbable amounts of happiness in minds which had no objective reason for being happy. 

V

The death of C’Tasha’s father, the most famous cat-athlete the underpeople had ever produced, gave Cruelson his first definite clue.

He went to the funeral himself, where the body was packed in an ice-rocket to be shot into space. The mourners were thoroughly mixed with the curiosity-seekers. Sport is international, inter-race, inter-world, inter-species. Hominids were there: true men, 100% human, their bodies modified over generations to meet the life conditions of a thousand worlds. Next to Cruelson there was a figure – male or female he could not tell, - with wispy white hair, a pendulous nose, and solid black eyes who floated just above the ground, having adapted extra telekinetic powers to contend with the poisonous dust a stray footstep might stir up in the place of their birth. Some rows away a bald woman with bright blue skin tinkered fretfully with the mechanical insets in her own arm. Halfway across the arena, a heavy-worlder loomed above the assembly, his skin set into thick plates like rhinoceros hide and a neck as thick as the imaginary Captain Amrika’s thighs. 

Of course there were underpeople there as well. Most in their work clothes, since few had clothing of any other description. Some few were actually working, attending to the distinguished guests who wished to be seen in the visuals of the faces upturned, watching the dead cat-man in his icy tomb take the final leap even he could not manage unassisted, out into the nothing-at-all. The underpeople looked far more human than most of the off-worlders. None were allowed to grow up if they were less than half the size of man, or more than six times the size of man. They all had to have human features and acceptable human voices. The punishment for failure in their elementary schools was death.

Cruelson looked over the crowd and wondered to himself, "We have set up the standards of the toughest kind of survival for these people and we give them the most terrible incentive, life itself, as the condition of absolute progress. What fools we are to think that they will not overtake us!" The other truepeople in the group did not seem to think as he did. They tapped the underpeople peremptorily with their canes, even though this was an underperson's funeral, and the bear-men, bull-men, cat-men and others yielded immediately and with a babble of apology. 

C’Tasha was close to her father’s icy coffin. Cruelson watched her, as did many others; she was pretty to watch. Prettiness was a duty, for her – inculcated from the beginning, and her grief a luxury: purchased for her by her father’s extraordinary achievements and her own ability to remain pretty and competent while grieving. But then, this was still early in the Rediscovery. Grief was a new and piquant flavor to many of the assembled. They lapped it up greedily and didn’t much want to share. Cruelson would have absolved himself of any such prurience, if challenged. Yet he still committed an act which would have been illegal for any but of a Lord of the Instrumentality. He peeped her mind. And there he found something he did not expect.

As the coffin-rocket launched, she spieked in a thin, pinpoint cry, _Oh, Pro-Fessa-Rex, help me! Help me!_

She had thought phonetically, not in script, and Cruelson had only the raw sound on which to base a search.

He had not become a Lord of the Instrumentality without applying daring. His mind was efficient, too quick to be deeply intelligent. He thought by gestalt as much as logic. He determined to force his friendship on the girl. She worked at the Triskelion; he determined to arrange a propitious meeting. Then he changed his mind about the timing.

As she went home from the funeral, Cruelson intruded on her circle of grimfaced friends, underpeople who were trying to shield her from the condolences of well-meaning but ill-mannered sports enthusiasts.

She recognized him, and showed him the proper respect. “My Lord, I did not expect you here. You knew my father?”

He nodded gravely and addressed sonorous words of consolation and sorrow, words which brought a murmur of approval from humans and underpeople alike. But with his left hand hanging slack at his side, he made the perpetual signal of _alarm! alarm!_ used among the Triskelion staff—a repeated tapping of the thumb against the third finger—when they had to set one another on guard without alerting the offworld transients. She was so upset that she almost spoiled it all. While Cruelson went on with his pious doublespeak, she cried in a loud, clear voice: “You mean _me?”_

And he went on with his condolences: “… and I do mean _you,_ C'Tasha, to be the worthiest carrier of your father's name. _You_ are the one to whom we turn in this time of common sorrow. _Who could I mean but you_ if I say that C'Yasha never did things by halves, and died young as a result of his own zealous conscience? Goodby, C'Tasha, I go back to my office.”

(She admitted, years later, that she had wondered in that terrible instant if Cruelson had somehow divined the true cause of C'Yasha's death, and with it, solved the officially unsolvable mystery of the fall of Lord Judge Pierce.) She arrived in Cruelson's office forty minutes after he did.

VI

He faced her straightaway, studying her face. “This is an important day in your life,” he began.

“Yes, my lord. A sad one.”

“I do not,” he said, “mean your father's death and burial. I speak of the future to which we all must turn. Right now, it's you and me.”

Her eyes widened. She had not thought he was that kind of man at all. He was an official who moved freely around the Triskelion, often greeting important offworld visitors and keeping an eye on the bureau of ceremonies. She was part of the reception team, when a girlygirl was needed to calm down a frustrated arrival or postpone a quarrel. She had an honorable profession; she was not a bad girl but a professionally flirtatious hostess. For her to go any further than that, with a trueman, would have meant immediate termination, though she was limited in her ability to say “no,” if the man insisted anyway. Her fine, gingery, furry hair stood out a little from her head at this suddenly increased threat, and her gaze sharpened. She stared at Lord Judge Cruelson. He did not look as if he meant anything improperly personal. But, thought she, you never could tell.

“You know people,” he said, passing the initiative to her.

“I guess so,” she said. Her face looked odd. She'd started to give him smile number three, (extremely adhesive) which she had learned in girlygirl school. Realizing it was wrong midway through, she'd tried to give him an ordinary smile. She felt she had made a face at him.

“Look at me,” he said, “and see if you can trust me. I am going to take both of our lives in my hands.”

She stared at him. What imaginable subject could involve him, a Lord of the Instrumentality, with herself, an undergirl? (There were many, she knew, but she could not imagine them. Not here, not now, not in the Triskelion with the tele-peepers and their random sampling of brainwaves, with the Policebot storage chambers scarcely a hundred meters from where they now stood). They never had anything in common. They never would. But she stared at him, forgetting to blink at the standard-human rate.

“I want to help the underpeople.”

That made her blink. That was a crude approach, too crude for one of Cruelson's reputation, usually followed by a very raw kind of pass indeed. But his face was illuminated by seriousness, his body still, eyelids politely lowered, gaze sidelong in the fashion of underpeople rather than the violent staring of most truemen. She waited.

“Your people do not have enough political power even to talk to us. I will not commit treason to the true human race, but I am willing to give your side an advantage. If you can bargain better with us, it will make all forms of life safer in the long run.”

C'Tasha stared at the floor, her soft red hair standing around her head, making it seem bathed in flames. Her eyes looked human, except they had the capacity of reflecting when the light struck them; the irises were the rich green of the ancient cat. When she whipped her head upward and he met her eyes, her glance had the impact of a blow. “What do you want from me.”

He stared right back. “Watch me. Look at my face. Are you sure, _sure,_ that I want nothing from you personally?”

She looked bewildered (number eleven, from girlygirl school, to be used among protective and avuncular guests to encourage indiscreet explanations) and took a covert breath through her mouth. She hadn't the nose of the dog-people, but it was enough to reassure her that this was not, at least, an impending rape. “What else is there to want from me, except personal things? I am a girlygirl. I'm not a person of any importance at all, and I do not have much of an education. You know more, sir, than I ever will.”

“Possibly,” he said, watching her.

She stopped feeling like a girlygirl and felt like a citizen. It made her uncomfortable. 

“Who,” he said, in a voice of great solemnity, “is your own leader?”

“Commissioner Koenig, sir. He's in charge of all outworld visitors.” She watched Cruelson carefully; he still did not look as if he were playing tricks.

He grew a little cross. “I don't mean him. He's part of my own staff. Who's your leader among the underpeople?”

“My father was, but he died.” She made sure her eyes welled a little. Cats did not naturally weep for sorrow, but they could learn to, if they needed a trueman to see them do it.

Cruelson looked regretful. “Forgive me. Please have a seat. I am sorry to press on you at such a time. But I don't mean that.” 

It might have been a good test, to demur and see how the High Lord Judge responded. But she was tired and the chair he indicated might well be softer than her bed. She sank into it with an innocent voluptuousness which would have disorganized any ordinary man's day. She wore girlygirl clothes, which were close enough to the everyday fashion to seem agreeably modish when she stood up. When she sat down, they were designed to be unexpectedly and provocatively revealing – not revealing enough to be brazen, but so slit, tripped, and cut that Cruelson got far more visual stimulation than he had expected.

“I must ask you to pull your clothing together a little,” he said in a clinical voice. “I am a man, even if I am an official, and this interview is more important to you and to me than any distraction would be.”

She was a little frightened by his tone. She had meant no challenge. With the funeral that day, she didn't have it in her to mean anything at all. These clothes were the only kind she had.

He read all this in his face, and winced. “Sorry,” he said, but pursued his subject relentlessly. “Young lady, I asked about your leader. You name your boss and you name your father. I want your _leader.”_

“I don't understand,” she said, on the edge of a sob. “I don't understand.”

He thought to himself, I've got to gamble. He thrust the mental dagger home, almost drove his words like steel straight into her face. “Who,” he said, slowly and icily, “Is Pro... fessa...rex?”

The girl's face had been cream-colored, pale with sorrow. Now she went white. She twisted away from him. Her eyes glowed like twin fires.

Her eyes… like twin fires.

(No undergirl, Cruelson thought as he reeled, could hypnotize _me._ )

Her eyes… like cold fires.

The room faded around him. The girl disappeared. Her eyes became a single white, cold fire.

Within this fire was a figure.

He sat on a chair – or a throne- fitted with wheels, in the manner of the ancient pictures of the Hawk King, a wiseman from the times before the Vomact. Nowadays anyone unable to walk was fitted with cloned limbs or mechanical prosthesis; Cruelson doubted anyone else in the Triskelion would recognize the device for what it was. Long wings swept down at either side, but he had human hands growing from the elbows of them. His legs, spindly even by the standards of the bird people, terminated in crippled toes. Cruelson felt himself rocked by astonishment – any underperson of such damaged mobility should have been euthanized at once. That this one had not been bespoke both of the power of his own mind, to fool the tele-peepers, and of the great love and value his fellow workers must hold him in, that he remained hidden, fed, clothed, and otherwise healthy. His face was clear, bald, cold as the marble of an ancient statue. “I am the Professor X. You will believe in me. You may speak to my daughter C'Tasha.”

The image faded.

Cruelson saw the girl staring as she sat awkwardly on the chair, looking blindly through him. He was on the edge of joking about her hypnotic capacity when he saw that she was still deeply hypnotized even after he had been released. Her posture had stiffened. Her clothing had again fallen into its planned disarray. The effect was not stimulating; it was pathetic beyond words. He spoke to her, not really expecting an answer. “Who are you?” he asked, testing her hypnosis.

She answered in a sharp whisper. “I am he whose name is never spoken aloud. I am he whose secret you have penetrated. I have printed my image and my name in your mind.”

Cruelson did not quarrel with ghosts like this. He snapped out a decision. “if I open my mind, will you search it while I watch you? Are you good enough to do that?”

“I am very good,” hissed the voice in the girl's mouth.

C'Tasha rose from the chair and put her two hands on his shoulders. She looked into his eyes. He looked back. A strong telepath himself, Cruelson was still unprepared for the enormous thought-voltage that poured out through her.

 _Look in my mind,_ he commanded, _for the subject of underpeople_ _only._

 _I see it,_ spieked the mind behind C'Tasha's mind.

_Do you see what I mean to do for the underpeople?_

Cruelson heard the girl breathing hard as her mind served as a relay to his. He tried to remain calm so that he could see which part of his mind was being searched. Very skillful so far, he thought to himself. This being must be something indeed, to hypnotize me against my will, and block the tele-peepers at the same time. An intelligence like this, here on Earth, he thought, and we Lords not knowing of it!

The girl hacked out a dry little laugh.

Cruelson thought at the mind. _Sorry. Go ahead._

 _This plan of yours,_ spieked the strange mind, _May I see more of it?_

_That's all there is._

_Oh,_ spieked the strange mind. _You want me to do your thinking for you._

 _Of course,_ Cruelson spieked, rather testily. _My contacts with your organization thus far have all been at the level of people like the rabbit girl, R'Odriguez, codename Yoyo. I haven't nearly enough information for thinking with, and I doubt you would wish to give it to me._

 _Oh, said the mind again,_ and Cruelson hoped he heard a merest tint of respect in it. _Can you give me the keys within the Insight Algorithm which pertain to destroying underpeople?_

 _You can have the information keys If I can ever get them,_ thought Cruelson, _but not the control keys and not the master switch of the Hub._

 _Fair enough,_ spieked the other mind, _and what do I pay for them?_

_You support me in my policies before the Instrumentality. You keep the underpeople reasonable, if you can, when the time comes to negotiate. You maintain honor and faith in all subsequent agreements. Can you help me get the keys? It will take me a year to figure them out myself._

_Let the girl look once,_ spieked the strange mind, _and I will be behind her. Fair?_

 _Fair,_ Cruelson replied.

 _Break?_ spieked the mind.

 _How do we reconnect?_ Cruelson spieked back

_As before. Through the girl. Never say my name. Don't think it if you can help it. Break?_

_Break!_ spieked Cruelson.

The girl, who had been holding his shoulders, drew his face down and kissed him firmly and warmly on the forehead. He had never touched an underperson before, and it never had occurred to him that he might kiss one. It was pleasant, but he took her arms away from his neck, half-turned her around, and let her lean against him.

"Papa," she sighed happily.

Suddenly she stiffened, looked at his face, and sprang for the door. "Cruelson!" she cried. "Lord Cruelson! What am I doing here?"

"Your duty is done, my girl. You may go."

She staggered back into the room. "I am going to be sick," she said. She vomited on his floor.

He pushed a button for a cleaning robot and slapped his desktop for tea.

She relaxed and they talked about his hopes for the underpeople. He apologized for having intruded on her mourning, and she protested, more than half-sincerely, that real changes for the underpeople on Earth would be a finer monument to C’Yasha than any dead rocket in the cold of the up-and-out. She stayed an hour. By the time she left they had a plan. Neither of them had mentioned Professor X, neither had put concrete goals in the open. If the monitors had been listening, they would have found no single sentence or paragraph which was suspicious.

When she had gone, Cruelson looked out of his window. He saw the clouds far below and he knew the world below him was in twilight. He had planned to help the underpeople, and he had met powers of which organized mankind had no conception or perception. He was righter than he had thought. He had to go on through.


	2. The What-She-Did

VII

In less than a week they had decided what to do. It was the Council of the Lords of the Instrumentality at which they would work—the brain center itself. The risk was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Hub itself.

This is the sort of thing which interested Cruelson.

He did not know that C'Tasha watched him with two different facets of her mind. One side of her was alertly and wholeheartedly his fellow-conspirator, utterly in sympathy with the revolutionary aims to which they were both committed. The other side of her—was feminine.

She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to the last millimeter the effect which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the woman by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study to her. She was a girl by profession; she was a human by assimilation; she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature. Now she was falling in love with Cruelson, and she knew it.

She remembered the off-Earth prince who had rested his head in her lap and had said, sipping his glass of motl by way of farewell: "Funny, C'Tasha,” he'd said, “you're not even a person and you're the most intelligent human being I've met in this place. Do you know it made my planet poor to send me here? And what did I get out of them? Nothing, nothing, and a thousand times nothing. But you, now. If you'd been running the government of Earth, I'd have gotten what my people need, and this world would be richer too. Manhome, they call it. Manhome, my eye! The only smart person on it is a female cat."

He'd run his fingers around her ankle. She did not stir. That was part of hospitality, and she had her own ways of making sure that hospitality did not go too far. Earth police were watching her; to them, she was a convenience maintained for outworld people, something like a soft chair in the Earthport lobbies or a drinking fountain with acid-tasting water for strangers who could not tolerate the insipid water of Earth. She was not expected to have feelings or to get involved. If she had ever caused an incident, they would have punished her fiercely, as they often punished animals or underpeople, or else (after a short formal hearing with no appeal) they would have destroyed her, as the law allowed and custom encouraged.

She had kissed a thousand men, maybe two. She had made them feel welcome and she had gotten their complaints or their secrets out of them as they left. It was a living, emotionally tiring but intellectually very stimulating. Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did.

Once a policewoman had had to read over the record of two pioneers from New Mars. C'Tasha had been given the job of keeping in very close touch with them. When the policewoman got through reading the report she looked at C'Tasha and her face was distorted with jealousy and prudish rage.

"Cat, you call yourself. Cat! You're a pig, you're a dog, you're an animal. You may be working for Earth but don't ever get the idea that you're as good as a person. I think it's a crime that the Instrumentality lets monsters like you greet real human beings from outside! I can't stop it. But may the Hub help you, girl, if you ever touch a real Earth man! If you ever get near one! If you ever try tricks here! Do you understand me?"

"Yes, ma'am," C'Tasha had said. To herself she thought, "That poor thing doesn't know how to select her own clothes or how to do her own hair. No wonder she resents somebody who manages to be pretty."

Perhaps the policewoman thought that raw hatred would be shocking to C'Tasha. It wasn't. Underpeople were used to hatred, and it was not any worse raw than it was when cooked with politeness and served like poison. They had to live with it.

But now, it was all changed.

She had fallen in love with Cruelson.

Did he love her?

Impossible. No, not impossible. Unlawful, unlikely, indecent—yes, all these, but not impossible. Surely he perceived something of her love.

If he did, he gave no sign of it.

People and underpeople had fallen in love many times before. The underpeople were always destroyed and the real people brainwashed. There were laws against that kind of thing. The scientists among people had created the underpeople, had given them capacities which real people did not have (the thousand-yard jump, the telepath two miles underground, the turtle-man waiting a thousand years next to an emergency door, the cow-man guarding a gate without reward), and the scientists had also given many of the underpeople the human shape. It was handier that way. The human eye, the five-fingered hand, the human size—these were convenient for engineering reasons. By making underpeople the same size and shape as people, more or less, the scientists eliminated the need for two or three or a dozen different sets of furniture. The human form was good enough for all of them.

But they had forgotten the human heart.

And now she, C'Tasha, had fallen in love with a man, a trueman old enough to have been her own father's grandfather. But she didn't feel daughterly about him at all. She remembered that with her own father there was an easy comradeship, an innocent and forthcoming affection, which masked the fact that he was considerably more cat-like than she was. Between them there was an aching void of forever-unspoken words—things that couldn't quite be said by either of them, perhaps things that couldn't be said at all. They were so close to each other that they could get no closer. This created enormous distance, which was heartbreaking but unutterable.

Her father had died, and now this trueman was here. He had summoned tea and cleaner bots when she had disgraced herself on the floor of his office, had assured her no demerits would attach to her health record for the incident. He had spoken of a world where the underpeople schools might have real windows and sunlight, where the cubs were given, not just physical education classes, but times to truly play games of their own choosing. He had spoken of ancient manhome institutions that had not been revived in the Rediscovery, of “Labor Unions,” and “Mutual Aid.” He had spoken of these things she had never heard of as though he trusted her to understand them, and C’Tasha, brilliant spy for two masters though she had been all her working life, found in his talk that new parts of herself opened up, listening, that all her competence still left parts of her untapped. He had petted her shoulders while she mourned her father and still, in his next utterance, treated her like a citizen! And he had done it all, even the frightening parts where her mind was not wholly her own, where she had sat in a dream world with her departed father while her leader and her boss’s boss conferred, in all of it, Cruelson had showed kindness.

"That's it," she whispered to herself, "with all the kindness that none of these passing men have ever really shown. With all the depth which my poor underpeople can never get. Not that it's not in us. But we're born like dirt, treated like dirt, put away like dirt when we die. How can any of my own men develop real kindness? There's a special sort of majesty to kindness. It's the best part there is to being people. And he has whole oceans of it in him. And it's strange, strange, strange that he's never given his real love to any human woman.”

She stopped, cold.

Then she consoled herself and whispered on, "Or if he did, it's so long ago that it doesn't matter now. He's got me. Does he know it?"

VIII

The Lord Cruelson did know, and yet he didn't. He was used to getting loyalty from people, because he offered loyalty and honor in his daily work. He was even familiar with loyalty becoming obsessive and seeking physical form, particularly from women, children and underpeople. He had always coped with it before. He was gambling on the fact that C’Tasha was a wonderfully intelligent person, and that as a girlygirl, working on the hospitality staff of the Triskelion police, she must have learned to control her personal feelings.

"We're born in the wrong age," he thought, "when I meet the most intelligent and beautiful female I've ever met, and then have to put business first. But this stuff about people and underpeople is sticky. Sticky. We've got to keep personalities out of it."

So he thought. Perhaps he was right.

If the nameless one, whom he did not dare to remember, commanded an attack on the Hub itself, that was worth their lives. Their emotions could not come into it. The Hub mattered: justice mattered: the return of mankind to humanity mattered. He did not matter, because he had already done most of his work. C'Tasha did not matter, because their failure would leave her with mere underpeople forever. The Hub did count.

The price of what he proposed to do was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Hub itself.

The Hub was a three-dimensional situation table, three times the height of a man. It was set one story below the meeting room, and shaped roughly like a spoked wheel. The meeting table of the Lords of the Instrumentality had a circle cut out of it, so that the Lords could look down into the Hub at whatever situation one of them called up either manually or telepathically. The Index below it, hidden by the floor, was the key memory-bank of the entire system. Duplicates existed at thirty-odd other places on Earth. Two duplicates lay hidden in interstellar space, one of them beside the ninety-million-mile gold-colored ship left over from the War against Glacticus and the other masked as an asteroid.

Most of the Lords were offworld on the business of the Instrumentality. Only three beside Cruelson were present—the Lady Fury’s Maryahill, her mentor the Lord Nicola’s Fury, and the Lord Tanleer’s Tivan.

Professor X had given Cruelson only the rudiments of a plan.

He was to bring C’Tasha into the chambers on a summons, investigating serious charges. They should avoid her summary death by automatic justice, if feasible. C'Tasha would go into partial trance in the chamber. Cruelson was then to call the items in the Hub which Professor X wanted traced. A single call would be enough. Professor X would take the responsibility for tracing them. The other Lords would be distracted by him, Professor X.

The plan seemed flimsy, but there was nothing which Cruelson could do at this time. He began to curse himself for letting his passion for policy involve him in the intrigue. It was too late to back out with honor; besides, he had given his word; besides, he liked C'Tasha—as a being, not as a girlygirl—and he would hate to see her marked with disappointment for life. He knew how the underpeople cherished their identities and their status.

With heavy heart but quick mind he went to the council chamber. A dog-girl, D’Arcy, one of the routine messengers whom he had seen many months outside the door, gave him the agenda.

He wondered how his fellow-conspirators would reach him, once he was inside the chamber with its tight net of telepathic intercepts. He sat wearily at the table— And almost jumped out of his chair.

IX

The conspirators had forged the agenda themselves, and the top item was: "C'Tasha daughter to C'Yasha, cat-stock (pure) lot 1138, confession of. Subject: conspiracy to export homuncular material. Reference: planet Milano."

The Lady Maryahill had already pushed the buttons for the planet concerned. The people there, Earth by origin, were enormously strong but they had gone to great pains to maintain the original Earth appearance. One of their first-men was at the moment on Earth. He bore the title of the Starlord, and he was on a mixed diplomatic and trading mission. Since Cruelson was a little late, C'Tasha was being brought into the room as he glanced over the agenda.

The Lord Tivan asked Cruelson if he would preside.

"I beg you, sir," he said, "to join me in asking the Lord Fury to preside this time."

The presidency was a formality. Cruelson could watch the Hub and Index better if he did not have to chair the meeting too.

C'Tasha wore the clothing of a prisoner. On her it looked good. He had never seen her wearing anything but girlygirl clothes before. The pale-blue prison tunic made her look very young, very human, very tender and very frightened. The cat family showed only in the fiery cascade of her hair and the lithe power of her body as she sat, demure and erect. Lord Fury ordered her: "You have confessed. Confess again."

"This man," and she pointed at a picture of the Starlord, "wanted to go to the place where they torment human children for a show."

"What!" cried three of the Lords together.

"What place?" said the Lady Maryahill, who was bitterly in favor of kindness.

"It's run by a man who looks like this gentleman here," said C'Tasha, pointing at Cruelson. Quickly, so that nobody could stop her, but modestly, so that none of them thought to doubt her, she circled the room and touched Cruelson’s shoulder. He felt a thrill of contact-telepathy and heard bird-crackle in her brain. Then he knew that the Professor X was in touch with her.

"The man who has the place," said C'Tasha, "is five pounds lighter than this gentleman, two inches shorter, and he has red hair. His place is at the Cold Sunset corner of the Triskelion, down the boulevard and under the boulevard. Underpeople, some of them with bad reputations, live in that neighborhood."

The Hub went milky, flashing through hundreds of combinations of bad underpeople in that part of the city. Cruelson felt himself staring at the casual milkiness with unwanted concentration.

The Hub cleared.

It showed the vague image of a stage on which adolescent children were trying to crash into each other with harvesting machines. There was an impression of thumping music and a woman singing about heroes.

The Lady Maryahill laughed, "Those aren't people. They're robots. It's just a dull old play."

"Then," added C'Tasha "he wanted a penny and a nickel to take home. Real ones. There was a robot who had found some."

"What are those?" said Lord Fury.

"Ancient coins—the real money of old Amrika," cried Lord Tivan. "I have copies, but there are no originals outside the state museum." He was an ardent, passionate collector of antiquities.

"The robot found them in an old hiding place right under the Triskelion."

Lord Tivan almost shouted at the Hub. "Run through every hiding place and get me those coins!"

The Hub clouded. In finding the bad neighborhoods it had flashed every police point in the Northwest sector of the tower. Now it scanned all the police points under the tower, and ran dizzily through thousands of combinations before it settled on an old toolroom. A robot was polishing little pieces of metal.

When Lord Tivan saw the polishing, he was furious. "Get that here," he shouted. "I want to buy those myself!"

"All right," said Lord Fury. "It's a little irregular, but all right."

The machine showed the key search devices and brought the robot to the shuttlevator.

The Lord Fury said, "This isn't much of a case."

C'Tasha sniveled. She was a good actress. "Then he wanted me to get a homunculus egg. One of the E-type, derived from birds, for him to take home."

Fury put on the search device.

"Maybe," said C'Tasha, "somebody has already put it in the disposal series."

The Hub and the Index ran through all the disposal devices at high speed. Cruelson felt his nerves go on edge. No human being could have memorized these thousands of patterns as they flashed across the Hub too fast for human eyes, but the brain reading the Hub through his eyes was not human. It might even be locked into a computer of its own. It was, thought Cruelson, an indignity for a Lord of the Instrumentality to be used as a human spy-glass.

The machine blotted up.

"You're a fraud," cried the Lord Fury. "There's no evidence."

"Maybe the offworlder tried," said the Lady Maryahill.

"Shadow him," said Lord Tivan. "If he would steal ancient money he would steal anything."

The Lady Maryahill turned to C'Tasha. “You're a silly thing. You have wasted our time and you have kept us from serious inter-world business."

"It _is_ inter-world business," wept C’Tasha. She let her hand slip from Cruelson’s shoulder, where it had rested all the time. The body-to-body relay broke and the telepathic link broke with it.

"We should judge that," said Lord Fury.

"You might have been punished," said Lady Maryahill.

The Lord Cruelson had said nothing, but there was a glow of happiness in him. If the Professor X was half as good as he seemed, the underpeople now had a list of checkpoints and escape routes which would make it easier to hide from the capricious sentence of painless death which human authorities meted out. But Lady Maryahill’s use of the conditional tense meant that C’Tasha herself would return to her work unscathed.

X

There was singing in the corridors that night.

Underpeople burst into happiness for no visible reason.

C'Tasha danced a wild cat dance for the next customer who came in from outworld stations, that very evening. When she got home to bed, she knelt before the picture of her father C'Yasha and gave thanks for what Cruelson and Professor X had done. And the next morning she reported to Commissioner Koening just as usual, and began her work again. She doubted she or Professor X would ever have further need of the High Lord Judge, and she could nurse her memory of kindness in private.

Cruelson himself felt a bit bewildered and dissatisfied with his part in the adventure. Taken apart logically, tidily, step by step, he could think of no greater service he was able to accomplish for the underpeople than the access to the Hub he had stolen for them; Professor X was clearly more intelligent than himself, and must, perforce, know a great deal more than he did about how best to help. But, tidy though he was, Cruelson had still within him the drives programmed in him long ago by his mad, suffering mentor Philips. Philips, in turn, had had a career of urgency and sacrifice and what passed in the Instrumentality for heroism. That his heir should solve the problem of the underpeople by allowing himself to be undignified in a meeting and keeping his mouth shut would not have seemed adequate to him at all, nor did it to Cruelson himself. Of course, there would be other meetings, and perhaps some day, when C’Tasha herself had long since been euthanized, (or, to be optimistic, hidden away in the warrens of the underpeople to age in rebellious peace) perhaps he would, for once, not be outvoted.

All the same, a hidden part of him longed for something more definite, for a clearer gesture he could make, to be allowed the privilege of real suffering and danger instead of the dabbling simulacrum of it that the Instrumentality had begun to engineer for the improvement of humanity. He kept up his contacts among the underpeople, though surely Professor X would have better means of reaching him if need be. He kept up his generally (though not always) fruitless policy work. He cultivated Lady Maryahill, who might someday be a better ally than Lord Fury was. And whenever new rumors reached him, he pored over them, looking for hints of C’Tasha.

They crossed paths again, without knowing it until afterward, in the matter of a nine days’ wonder that occupied all of Manhome for a time, and Cruelson in particular: the maverick heir of one of the smaller stroon ranches on Norstrilia. 

Tony Stark the One Hundred and Fifty Fourth uncovered somewhere on his wind-scoured properties both an illegally imported computer system and the talents within himself to turn it into something entirely other. Master Stark used these two things together to play the Stroon market in ways it had never been played before and earn enough hard currency, even under the draconian tax regulations of Norstrilia, to buy planet Earth. All of it: real estate, equipment, mineral and water and bandwidth rights, the labor contracts of every person and underperson on it. All with enough left over to purchase passage on a planoform ship to come over and inspect his new property himself.

From the moment Mr. Stark arrived, together with a number of specially commissioned doubles, some of whom were surgically altered humans and some of which were robots, to the moment the Norstrilians confirmed he had returned to Iron Ranch to take up the reins of his legacy, Philips’ Cruelson got less than four hours’ sleep in any twenty-four, and half his dreams were taken up with telepathic conferences. There was the matter of the brain-bomb that went off as everyone was debarking the ship that held the Starks, of the machinations of Officially Corrupt Lord Stane, of the throngs that wished to do harm to Stark, and/or enter into a marriage contract with him.

On top of that, there was the Manhome tax structure to completely reconfigure. If Stark truly meant to take over the running of Earth, eighty-eight percent of his newfound wealth would have returned back to the Instrumentality within a year, with a similar proportion of the remaining twelve percent garnished again the year after that, and so on down until Stark was no richer than any other high lord. That the measures that rescued the planet from whatever Stark might do with it would also serve as a check on High Lord Wilson’s Fisk, Cruelson considered a very pleasant benefit indeed. He allowed himself an egg at breakfast the morning the vote went through, even though it had only been a hundred days since the last one.

As to Stark himself, Cruelson liked him well enough. He had the typical unmodulated voice of the Norstrilians, who normally preferred to communicate telepathically, and so shouted or whispered with no in-betweens when speaking aloud. He displayed a boundless and equally unmodulated enthusiasm for all the ten thousand little luxuries that Earth took for granted and Norstrilia had purged, from water baths to turbocaviare. He dressed in the brightest colors he could find, agreed to every marriage contract he was offered, paid lavish rewards to any person or underperson who could procure for him any genuine Old Earth “postage stamps:” ridiculously fragile and tiny shapes of wood-pulp paper used as currency only within the couriers’ trade, long, long ago.

And under this youthful boom and flash, Cruelson detected not only the keen mind that had pulled off the financial coup of a four century lifetime, but also a kindly, open heart, that led the man to thank serving robots and diplomats with the same rough courtesy, to causally repair a malfunctioning police unit he came across when one of Stane’s minions tried to act against him. He recognized the subject of Cruelson’s Lichtenstein at once; the indomitable Captain Amrika had been forgotten everywhere, but not in the nowhere country of Norstrilia, with its acres of giant, sickly sheep.

And it was under the geometrical printed chin of Captain Amrika, drinking some of Cruelson’s prized coffee, that Stark passed on the secret he had been keeping throughout his whirlwind first weeks on Earth.

Cruelson had invited him in for a friendly chat when he first checked the Galactibank’s balance for Master-and-Owner Stark and discovered that most of the money was gone, all but the twelve percent of twelve percent he had himself planned to leave the man with in two years. The lump transaction had been made the previous night, and the recipient was marked “extra-super private,” and encrypted beyond even Cruelson’s overrides. He could only see that no other registered citizen had had their balance increase a commensurate amount, nor had the Instrumentality, except for the required gift taxes, nor the Norstrilian Parilament. What was left? A consortium of some kind?

So he invited Stark over for breakfast, the two of them being among the few true humans who woke at dawn by preference, and the only two on Earth or its orbit who could appreciate a Lichtenstein print of Captain Amrika.

XI

“You aren’t the real Tony Stark the One Hundred Fifty Fourth, are you?” Cruelson began.

The man lounging across from him snickered and slapped his own knees, then looked up with a smirk. “I am now,” he said. “I’m the only Tony Stark the One Hundred Fifty Fourth anywhere at all now except Norstrilia, and Norstrilia doesn’t let in any outsiders or talk to them, so I’m the only one that matters.”

That, Cruelson thought, depended entirely on what one meant by _matters,_ but the man had a point. “Who were you before you were Tony Stark, then?”

“Oh,” the only Tony Stark on Earth shrugged, “I was Harriet Hogan. First Foreman on the Iron Ranch, the one who protected Tony and helped him keep out of the gigglehouse all those years until your clever doctors on Mars could help him fix that heart of his. I was glad to do it, but I have to say, being a rich man on earth is a lot more fun than being a middling woman on Norstrilia. I’m happy now, in this life, making trouble of one kind or another for myself, in a way I never was when I was keeping that little scamp out of it, however much I love him. I’m just happy, now. I’m happy.” “Well, then, Happy, welcome again to Earth.” Cruelson eyed his companion as he gulped coffee. “I don’t suppose you can tell me which of the other Tony Starks was the genuine one?”

The man laughed again. “None of them!” he crowed. “The same surgeon who changed us over changed him.”

Cruelson pondered this. There had been no other humans on that ship, save for the go-captain, the stop-captain, the pinlighters, and the swarm of Tony Starks.

“He came on a different ship?”

“Nah.” Happy said around a mouthful of fruit, “We made him look like a cat-man.” 

Cruelson choked.

“Doctor Simmons made that same face,” Harriet-Tony-Happy said, “when we told her what we wanted done. Like it was obscene somehow, but really, why not? A few monofilament whiskers, some fur plugs here and there, different colored eyes? And the animal people, they go everywhere and see everything, and no one looks at them. We Norstrilians are used to hard work and danger, so that’s no problem. Just needed a guide to show him how to get on, and we had a good one. Nice girl.”

Cruelson knew who it must have been. His lips formed the name, silently. 

The man who had been Harriet Hogan, now Tony Stark the First on Earth, prattled on, relieved, perhaps, to have done with secrets for a time. “Did him a world of good, that time with the animal-people. He’s been an overgrown boy for years, Tony, and he was a man when he got on that ship home, a young one, but a man. That R’Hodey fellow, at the store in Oldtown where we found the stamps, he knew how to sort a fellow’s head out. And of course, C’Tasha.”

“Of course,” Cruelson said, faintly.

“Seemed like her name was every other word came out his mouth for a bit; he’d even talked about trying to take her back home with him. But no, he’ll be better off with Pepper from the Potts Ranch.”

“I’m sure,” said Cruelson. His mind whirled. To choose to become an underperson, even temporarily! And though Happy said nothing about it, and Cruelson was not so gauche as to ask any questions, he was certain that he now knew what had become of the planet-buyer’s fortune. The underpeople had had the tools of secrecy and conspiracy for ever, though they could use them only sparingly. But now they had real money, galactic money, not just underscrip. The revolution had a budget. The time Cruelson had worked for had suddenly become much closer.


	3. Under Dee-See

XII

The revolution had a budget, and that meant Cruelson’s official, aboveboard involvement in the affairs of the underpeople became much more intricate and time-consuming. He thought of C’Tasha only rarely, both because he was otherwise occupied and because it was safer that way. Even a High Lord Judge of the Instrumentality was not immune to the random scans of the tele-peepers. 

Nonetheless, he did submit eventually to temptation. In a routine meeting, he asked Chief Koenig of the Hospitality Corps if anything further had come from that cat-girl who had accused Starlord Quill of smuggling, all those years ago. Koenig, brooding over his desk and his hundred little pressing matters, had been dismissive. “C’Tasha? She’s long gone. She’d be far too old for girlygirl work these days.”

For a moment, Cruelson’s tidy, compartmentalized mind was nearly overcome with horror. He imagined bright green eyes and soft, flame-colored hair and graceful, creamy limbs, pinned and bruised by the robot-police when they collected underpeople tagged for non-payment of rent, trundled them off to the Poorhouse, and, a few minutes later, fed the remains to the meat-mulchers.

Only with difficulty did he remind himself that times had changed, that the underpeople now received wages that could, with prudence, allow them to afford some years of honorable retirement. And besides, surely Professor X would have been willing to help one of his most remarkable operatives escape to the hidden ghettos that even now, hundreds of years after Azzano, sprang up like mushrooms in the forgotten caves and tunnels beneath the cities of Manhome? Firmly, Cruelson pulled himself together and prepared to conclude his meeting with Chief Koenig. He was a High Lord Judge of the Instrumentality, and whatever his political views, could have no interest in the fate of any individual underperson beyond vaguely charitable curiosity.

He started badly when a voice spoke from behind and above his left shoulder.

“Mister High Lord Judge, sir,” it said, “There is a C’Tasha that runs an underpeople bar and eatery, down there in Oldtown Dee-See under the Triskelion. She might be the one you are thinking of.”

Cruelson turned and looked, to see a sandy-colored cat-man who had, for some reason, chosen to perch up on the high bracket Koenig installed on the wall for the convenience of the bird people and others too small to see over his desk from the human-sized chairs. With an effort, he addressed the newcomer with mild courtesy. “If that is the same cat woman, then I am happy for her. She was a good employee and I imagine she would be a good manager.”

The cat-man grinned. His clothes, Cruelson noted, marked him as a girlyboy, the same job C’Tash had had, though he clearly went about it rather differently. He was young enough that he might not have ever had to do that work without being able to summon Station Security, if an honored guest required that his host perform services that were punishable by euthanasia. There was a clarity, an innocence about him that was entirely different from the sort of innocence that C’Tasha had performed, once upon a time. He was doing C’Tasha’s old job (both of them? All three of them?) but he was not a slave, he was a citizen (reserve grade) with a photopass that protected his identity and the rights and property pertaining thereto. Why, Cruelson wondered, was the existence of C’Lint not enough to content the part of him that yearned to his first purpose?

Koenig looked up and saw nothing more than one of his direct reports. The Chief of the Hospitality Corps sighed through his nose. “I give you good day, High Lord Cruelson. What is it _now,_ C’Lint?”

Cruelson made his way, contemplative, back to his enormous wood-paneled rooms in the rim of the Triskelion. So many little, but significant, changes in the last few years, that had led to the existence of the sanguine cat man in Koenig’s office. C’Lint could, if so inclined, save for a pension. If chosen to do so, he could even, a few times a year and in a few, regulated settings, bargain with the Instrumentality as a near-equal. Did that mean the problem of the underpeople was solved?

At his desk, Cruelson reviewed the agendas for the next few meetings of the Instrumentality. Lord Fury had elected to submit his official death date nearly a hundred years ahead of schedule; Cruelson wondered if he planned to seek a particular death, or merely had plans for which official existence would be inconvenient. Tony Stark the First on Manhome, formerly known as Harriet Hogan, of Iron Ranch, Norstrillia, was to be reviewed as a candidate for Cadet Lordship. Grant’s Ward, barely a decade into his own initiation, had already elected to accept Official Corruption instead – an extra thousand years of life and a luxury allotment boost, without any political power or responsibility. None of these matters interested Cruelson in the slightest. He submitted the forms to place himself on a recreational scouting mission.

XIII

Cruelson had, as most High Lords did, a mechanissary: a robot assistant to monitor his health and his calendar and other minutiae, and to maintain in its data library such information as might be useful but not so urgent that he need maintain it in his own neural pathways. Cruelson had had his fashioned in the humanoid shape favored by the old-fashioned and the practical, on the principle that anywhere he himself went his assistant might follow him as needed. He called it May. In one way, and only one, did Cruelson give any indication that he considered the possibility that his scouting mission might prove serious, rather than recreational, and that was in the instructions he gave to May prior to their departure for Dee-See.

“May, I have a long-term assignment for you. Are you ready to receive parameters?”

The robot stood before him in the attentive, neutral posture of all the swarms of young functionaries who performed minor tasks in the Triskellion, whose uniforms its chassis had been painted to resemble. Its thorax had been designed with feminine curves and its head fitted with a wig, because many persons were soothed by such signifiers, but where C’Tasha and the other girlygirls were feminine in welcome and invitation, May was feminine in retreat, in smallness and discretion. Neither the tectonic strength nor the encyclopedic knowledge base common to the mechanissaries showed at all on the surface.

“I am ready, sir.”

“Good. Your assignment, May, is to follow me as Witness. Record everything I do, starting with these parameters, and everything that happens to me from here out unless I specifically bar you, in which case you should request parameters for resuming your Witness. The designated recipient of these recordings is High Lady Judge Maryahill. Now, listen, May, this is important: The safe delivery of these recordings is more important than their completeness. Unlock Discretionary Self-determination Protocol Thirty-Three.”

“Unlocked, sir.” The mechanissary’s voice took on a grave timbre, a modicum of greater expressiveness. It now had access to all the layers of data and memory within its banks, not only at Cruelson’s request, but at its own.

“Good. If you are not otherwise hindered or endangered, you may consider the file complete when I die, at whatever time in the next few days or decades that happens. However, if your determination, under Protocol Thirty-Three, is that your odds of returning the recordings intact to Lady Maryahill are less than eight-five percent if you continue to follow me, your priority is the safe delivery of the recordings. I expect I will learn a great deal, May, and I may not spiek of it as I might wish to, but I do not want that knowledge lost if it can be preserved.”

The amber eyes of the mechanissary lit, and it made a humming sound. “Your parameters have been received and integrated, High Lord.” 

And so Cruelson packed his things, boarded the shuttlevator, and made his way into the streets of Dee-See with a metal shadow behind him, watching everything.

XIV

Dee-See was a remarkable city, even among the fabled, ramified, ancient cities of Manhome: remarkable for the weight of its long history, remarkable for the strangeness and novelty that flowed out from the many outworld visitors, remarkable, too, for the aura of secrecy and danger that seeped like a miasma from the city’s very architecture. As the anchor and conduit of the Triskelion, Dee-See was a place where humans did real work that had real consequences, measured in something other than Instrumentality-mandated contentment, as well as an usually high concentration of the clever, ruthless, labyrinthine Lords of the Instrumentality. The very hospitals of Dee-See were seats of ambition and jockeying. Out in the staid regions of Cascadia or Missip, doctors saw to their practice bots and dreamed of Dee-See General, where as many as a dozen new human patients with genuine ailments or injuries were admitted every day. Any minor encounter in the city might have deadly import hidden behind it, or might, equally, be as meaningless as patterns made by the shifting contents of the bowl of antique plastic buttons R’hodey kept on the front counter of his famous antique shop in Oldtown. Several popular entertainers made their homes there, convenient to the planoform ships that took them on galactic wide tours. For the same reason, many of the new, carefully calibrated plagues the Instrumentality released from time to time to re-introduce the concepts of risk and suffering to the masses of humanity found their first victims in the city.

Philips’ Cruelson, long inured to levels of urgency that far exceeded the ones that excited the tourists, looked at the bright, wide vistas of the city’s pleasure quarters with an assessor’s eye, picking out indicators that certain changes of policy were or were not having their intended effects.

“Reintroducing different languages and cultural preferences seems to have gone well,” he murmured, half to himself and half to May, who was recording everything. “See there? Look at the signs on the eateries.”

The official language of Dee-See was still Earth Standard, out of the necessities of diplomacy and bureaucracy. But several neighboring communities had been assigned other subsets, and now many of the eateries proclaimed their specialties in one regional cuisine or another, not only through holos of their most temptingly prepared dishes, but by signs and menus written in Basque, or Cherokee, or Tamil, set out to offer homely comfort to speakers of the most common languages in Eastern Yusa.

On the tram Cruelson boarded to Oldtown, two earnest young people debated fiercely about whether Nahuatls or Alsatians made the better go-captains and pinlighters, which made Cruelson laugh at their ignorance, for aptitudes of that nature were the purview of the embryo programmers while language and culture were a matter for the sleep-teachers, much further along in the process. 

At the station for Oldtown there was a fuss. A man ran down the platform and leaped for the doors of the tram, only to be pulled back by a crowd of angry people. “Stop him!” someone shouted, “He’s a thief!” With great calmness May extended her titanium-reinforced foot and tripped him up. 

The crowd hauled the man up by the shoulders and marched him back toward Oldtown. Cruelson and May followed, curious. A smaller man with a pronounced Nahuatl accent skittered out of the mass and panted up to the glowering Maitre D’ at one of the more exclusive eateries. “We have him for you, sir and mister!” A set of peremptory hands steered the thief briskly back to the front of the restaurant. Another from the crowd, a very tall man in Lebanese robes, glowered at him. “Go on, then,” he said. 

Grimacing resentfully, the thief plunged his hands into the barrel of coins that sat in front of the restaurant and counted out the cost of his meal into the Maitre D’s hands.

“There, now,” the Lebanese man purred gently, “that wasn’t so hard, was it?” The thief spat a resentful curse at all of them and stalked away. The Maitre D’ let the coins fall back into the barrel, ready for the next customer. 

Someone in the crowd shrilled, “No respect for property! No respect for other people’s hard work! He ought to submit himself for reprogramming, he should!”

Cruelson moved on down the road, musing. He’d had his doubts about the Instrumentality’s scheme for reintroducing money into daily living, but people really did seem to be getting into the spirit of the thing.

XVI

Inquiries among the Oldtown crowds led Cruelson to the wrong place, but he didn’t realize it until it was too late. To be fair, the Al-Qutn was, indeed, a bar and eatery run by a catwoman. And it was, Cruelson realized with a certain ruefulness, what most homonids would think he meant by an “Underperson bar.” That was to say, it had taken “underpeople” as its theme, as other nightclubs along the boulevard had chosen Ancient Finland, or the watery depths of Europa. It was a cavernous space, the little tables set in tiers like theater seats, the better to be able to see the immense, glittering stage. All the servers were underpeople, and so were the singers, dancers, musicians, cleaners, and doorpeople. They moved with a confidence and ease that was deeply unusual for underpeople in the presence of hominids, and must seem particularly exotic for the visitors from places like sleepy Missip, where there was no hospitality industry to speak of and the few girlygirls were private luxuries.

Everything about the place seemed designed to increase this titillation. The uniforms of the staff and the costumes of the dancers vaulted over the subtle provocations of standard girlygirl clothes and landed in outright display: the cow-men wore leather epaulettes connected by gleaming chains across bare, broad, gleaming shoulders. Scarlet sashes moved with the sinuous hips of the otter people, their ends twitching like their owners' lost tails. The owner/hostess, C'Yelena, wore a skintight gown that glimmered like fish scale, only a little less white than her white skin and hair, with a vee neck that opened down past her third set of nipples and seemed as though it might, at any moment, reveal them to view. Gold rings dangled from the long, silken ears of the limber-voiced dog-woman who crooned in the ampli-cone at the front of the stage. (This last made Cruelson stare for a few moments, until May engaged her telescopic vision and confirmed that the ears were prosthetics, that the singer's real ears had had their regulation crop.)

Cruelson was acutely uncomfortable. He watched from a table on the second tier and ordered an expensive meal and coffee. May took up a station just behind him, eyes lowered but other sensors in fine working array, just in case the danger of this place became something other than atmospheric without warning.

His waitress, a buxom, tender-eyed cow-girl, tripped up to his table with his food and a steaming pot. “And would sir and master like … milk, with his coffee?” she cooed in a low voice, lowering her eyelids with their thick, heavy lashes, and letting one satin-gloved, two-fingered hand stray toward the ruffled skirt that hid her udder from view. Cruelson nearly spit out his coffee. What he said aloud was, “Do they admit cow-girls to girlygirl school now? The last I heard it was only cats, dogs, and a few parrots.”

The waitress dropped her flirtatious manner immediately. Her skin twitched in embarrassment. “The nurse and girlygirl tracks don't separate until third year,” she muttered, almost too low to be heard under the music. “I had a few friends… and then C'Yelena recruited me, and she saw to it that I got additional coaching.”

“Well done,” Cruelson congratulated the girl solemnly. “And, no milk, thank you, though if you happen to have ground cardamom on hand I will take a little of that, please.”

The cow-woman's eyelashes fluttered. “Of course, sir and Master, I will check at once!” She tripped away again and left Cruelson to his meal.

The food, he found, was bland and forgettable, almost certainly robot-made and obtainable at prices far lower than Al-Qutn charged. This made sense, he reflected. Many of the sort of tourists that frequented this place would shudder to eat anything prepared by an underperson's hands, even as they ogled and fantasized. Then, too, the skilled performers in their elaborate costumes, the brisk and efficient staff, the state-of-the-art sound system, all those must require considerable expense to maintain the glamorous aura of the club, and keep the profit margins well below the acceptable maximum for underpeople-owned businesses without any special effort being put into food or drinks that most of the clientele hardly noticed.

The singing dog made her way from the stage amid a thunder of applause, and C’Yelena slunk her way into the ampli-cone in her place, purring amusedly. “Yes,” she told the crowd, “That was our gorgeous Poochie, with the ancient ballad, ‘L’mour est un Oiseau Rebelle!’ Nobody born nor made can tug on the heartstrings like our sweet spaniel songstress.” Golden cat eyes flared in the lights, and C’Yelena’s curled smile broadened to show her expertly reconfigured teeth, only the sharp canines betraying her carnivorous tastes. “But now it’s time to liven things up a little!” she cried, and watched the audience stir and call in response. She waited for them, head tilted gracefully on her long neck so her short, plush white hair glimmered in the scalding stage lights.

“This next number,” she announced, “is a simple little ditty you might hear anywhere a few underpeople are gathered in a happy mood. It honors one of our great heroes, who saved untold lives and made it possible for us to gather together in delightful places like this one and show you all a good time. So: here are Al-Qutn’s very own Happy Hoofers and the Fabulous Springheel Sisters...” her voice raised from a purr to a yowl to be heard above the excited cheering of the crowd, “Giving you tonight the hottest, swingingest song in all Yusa: the Ballad of Lost C’Tasha!”

In the hot, stuffy air of the nightclub, redolent with cheap intoxicants and musky perfume, Philips’ Cruelson felt himself grow cold.

XVII

The Happy Hoofers proved to be six goat-men and two cow-boys, lighter than the full-grown bouncers but still larger than the goats. The eight of them danced barefoot on the glittering stage, striking up compelling, changeable rhythms in the beat of their hardened feet on the floor, while the Fabulous Springheel Sisters, who might be of lemur origin, though it was hard to be sure in the flash and glitter of the Al-Qutn, made their own visible kind of music with their acrobatics and the filmy swirl of their skirts. Despite being called a “ballad,” the song they danced to seemed to have very few lyrics, or if it had more, they were not being sung in this company. Cruelson strained his ears to pick out every one:

Oh, she knew the which of the what-she-did  
She hid the hub with a blot, she did  
But she fell in love with a homonid  
Now where is the which of the what-she-did?

When the cow-waitress returned with the cardamom, Cruelson put out a hand to detain her a moment. “I am High Lord Judge Philips’ Cruelson,” he told her quietly, “and I, too, know the which of the what-she-did. If I were to go looking for her now, or for those who know what happened to her afterward, where should I begin?”

The cowgirl’s skin twitched again, her large eyes blinked. Cruelson turned his hand palm-up to reveal the coin it held: neither underscrip nor one of the ones from the barrel in front of the club, this was a genuine anonymous transfer chip worth a fiftieth of a stroon tablet, spendable anywhere in the galaxy. “If a friend of hers wanted to seek her out,” he repeated,”who should he ask?”

Philips’ Cruelson had long had a talent for getting useful information out of the young and bribeable.

XVII

The shop called Patriot Antiques, in Oldtown Dee-See, was the largest, oldest, and most famous underperson-owned business in all Yusa, possibly all of Manhome. The building was a warren of shelves, cases, baskets and boxes and barrels, holding everything from the ancient world that any underperson or robot working in the depths of manhome might come across. Shards of decorated tile and scratched glass marbles filled jars and trays. Delicate lengths of textile and painstakingly re-assembled sections of mural hung in frames. Ancient coins of real metal rested in beds of fungifoam. Long ranks of the orange polymer votive figures known as mattels kept watch from the shelves, some still topped with long, tangled hair, a few with wide blue painted eyes still mostly intact on their grimacing faces.

The proprietor R’Hodey, an elegant, tidy raccoon-man with very dark skin, greeted Cruelson without any sign of excitement, and invited him to sit at a table made from a polished stone grave-marker and drink tea from a set older than Captain Amrika. R’Hodey was well used to the Instrumentality and its secrets, being one of them himself. While the cluttered warehouse did a fine trade, the coins in the money barrel barely having time to cool off from one set of hands to the next, some days, the true wealth of Patriot Antiques lay below, in the ancient machines that R’Hodey had discovered himself, refurbished, learned the workings of, and now put to use in the service of the Instrumentality. Modern brain-trainers were precise and efficient, very useful for clearly-defined mental aberrations and proscribed dogmas. The ancient Binary Augmented Retro-Framing Device, though, encouraged wisdom and contentment without inhibiting imagination or initiative. It allowed its users, not to forget old pains, but to heal them, to grow beyond them. R’Hodey, grown wise himself through its use, blessed selected people and underpeople both in the same way.

It was a kindly way to make a living, and R’Hodey was a kindly r-man, but he was not a simpleton. The exact schematics and workings of the B.A.R.F were a closely guarded secret, known entirely only to himself and his daughter, R’Iri. A few trusted homonids had been able to purchase simplified versions – trancaps, that did some of what R’Hodey’s machine did, but not enough to allow the underman to become redundant, or for anyone at all to undercut his prices or gainsay his decisions about whom he would or would not serve. R’Hodey had carved out a separate peace for himself and his chosen family. 

He was the only underman in the Instrumentality to have been _legally_ dosed with stroon.

Cruelson knew of him, though they had not met face to face before, and had already been intending to visit before the cow-girl waitress from Al-Qutn had whispered his name, because of his reported involvement with the genuine Tony Stark the Hundred and Fifty-Fourth. Now that he had heard from the waitress, he would still ask about Stark, but he would listen for whispers of C’Tasha.

“He was a nice boy,” the raccoon-man said. “Nothing remarkable, from my point of view, despite all the ways he was, clearly, very unusual for a trueman. But he had the same kinds of things he needed help with as most of them do – some old memories, some anger out of proportion, some fears set a little too deep into his habits, you know the kind of thing. He's going to be a force to be reckoned with, now he's back home, though. If they know what's good for them they'll put him on the planetary defense system, somewhere like that; if they leave him alone to tinker on his home ranch he'll have completely rewritten their way of life before they know what's hit them.”

Cruelson kept his expression at its blandest. He avoided smiling too much when among underpeople; a show of teeth still made many of them nervous. “Oh?” he said, “why is that?”

“He only had two sessions in the B.A.R.F and it was enough for him to reverse-engineer the trancaps. He has plans to give one to that business rival of his, Hammer – says the man went after him out of resentment, because Hammer's a shortie – stroon resistant, only gets a hundred years of life – and he thought using a trancap to dream a thousand years worth of memories in a day or two might straighten him out.”

This was, Cruelson agreed, remarkable. Then he noticed the anomaly. “He needed two sessions?”

R’Hodey’s nose twitched. “Define _need,_ ” he said. “He is a generous man, Stark, and a passionate one. You have guessed, I think, what he has done for the underpeople. But he would have wanted more, to force things faster, to take the Instrumentality apart and rebuilt it like one of his machines, and that, you know, doesn’t work so well with people. What he thought he wanted would have destroyed itself if he tried to achieve it – there is no way for humans and underpeople to be happy together in that way, yet. But he could have the dream of it, the memory of love that he wanted, and she could have it with him, and they could both go more contentedly back to their real, possible lives.”

“She,” Cruelson said, “C’Tasha.” So, he thought, Stark was the one. So.

R’Hodey spread his dark hands. “If the underpeople had a say in which one of us might be given your precious drug, without reference to how we might serve the rest of you, many of us might recommend C’Tasha. We can’t give her a Lordship, a thousand years of life. But with the B.A.R.F, she could have a thousand years of memories, at least. She could have stepped out of it, let Stark have a dream of a cat-woman instead of another mind dreaming with him. She didn’t, and she has never said she regretted that choice.”

Cruelson nodded. “And her choice is hers alone and I would not take it from her. But if it were possible, I would like to speak with her again, as I did once or twice years ago, when she was still a girlygirl under Commissioner Koenig. I could have her summoned, of course, but that hardly seems fair. Or you could tell me where to find her now, which is likely a place where homonids are unexpected and unwelcome, though there are few means to kick us out.” He made a frustrated gesture. “I and those of my line were given a task by High Lord Philips, over a hundred years ago; to solve the problem of the underpeople. And I have done a little, mostly by not hindering the efforts of others who did more, and much has been done. But still there is no place where a revered Lady of the Underpeople and a Lord Judge of the Instrumentality might simply speak and listen to each other. Perhaps that will have to wait for one of my successors: some future Lord Kegyetlenseg or Lady Jestocost. But the problem and the solving of it were inscribed into my nature by the embryo programmers, and I must keep trying so long as I live.”

One of R’Hodey’s wide-set eyes looked directly into Cruelson’s, as underpeople rarely looked at anyone. The other looked over Cruelson’s shoulder, at his quiescent mechanissary. He could have offered the B.A.R.F, or a trancap, an extra hundred or thousand years to dream of new possibilities or think through the tangled problems of the world. Instead, he said, “I will tell you how to find the Guest House.”

XIX

As Cruelson had said, C’Tasha and the other Underpeople had no real way, even now, to forbid a High Lord Judge from trespassing on their private doings. But custom and inconvenience were powerful protections that they had used well, and Cruelson was only the second trueman ever to make his way to the Guest House, the first to do so in his own original shape, because other than himself and Tony Stark the One-hundred-fifty-fourth, nobody had wanted to.

No shuttlevator descended into the utilities level below ancient, shining Dee-See. There were only endless, narrow-rung ladders and the speeding, clanking, perilous zip of the Cargo Line: a miles-long, whirring chain to which the bull-and-gorilla-derived stevedores clipped massive loads from the storage caverns to send them to the surface. A young, nimble underperson could hop from certain places at just the right moment and hitch a ride up or down on the swinging cargo pods, perhaps hooking a limb into one link of the chain for additional security.

Cruelson, still nimble if no longer young, and proud though he was of his inquisitive spirit and personal courage, nonetheless found he was clutching at both the chain and at the steely arm May had wrapped around him to help steady him. He imagined the feckless young Norstilian, Stark, wearing his false fur, doing the same thing to C’Tasha, sometime during his headlong time on Manhome.

“Three, two, one, NOW!” May warned, and the High Lord and his mechanissary leapt as one from the swaying cargo pod and landed with a clang on a length of rail-track that hung above the depths. This stretch of track had not had a train on it since, probably, the age of sail; the caverns it served had been emptied or else forgotten. This made no difference to the three harassed maintenance robots that kept it in perfect repair. The slick rails and the wide-spaced ties between them now served as a sort of foot-highway for underpeople, who trotted along the length of it as if none of them had ever put a foot wrong and slid down between the ties, or been knocked sideways off the rail they balanced on by someone else’s burden.

“It would do no harm,” Cruelson groused, “to lay a bit of plyboard between the ties, or string a rope handgrip along the sides.”

“The maintenance robots would object,” May noted dispassionately, trotting along beside him and reaching out now and then when her risk assessment program judged that the High Lord was paying insufficient attention to his own feet.

“Besides, why would they bother? The life of an underperson is full of ways to die, and this one can be avoided with nothing more than attention. Why waste their materials allotment on such a thing? That platform there, sir, is the one we are making for. Be ready to jump again.”

And thuswise they made their way into the old, half-forgotten caverns that had become the underpeople’s own business district.

XX

The Guest House, when they came to it, proved to be nearly as large and noisy as Al-Qutn, and to resemble the other eatery in no other regard. The lights were dim and yellowish, the walls decorated mostly with cables and conduits, the heights hidden in a maze of stairs, platforms, and curtains that held, according to R’hodey, temporary sleeping quarters. The center of the space was not a stage, but the solid bulk of the Utility Core, holding power sources, a worn but serviceable stasis pantry, a bank of sinks used by staff and patrons alike, and probably discreet disposal cubicles around the back. The bar and two different cooking stations – one with great stewpots, the other with a broad grill covered with sliced vegetables and rounds of flatbread – flanked the core like orbiting planets, and each of these stations had its own asteroid belt of chairs and tables of disparate heights and sizes, ready to seat underpeople of all shapes and sizes.

And of course, the underpeople themselves wore their ordinary clothes.

The scent, too, was unlike anything in Old Town: thick, mealy, gamy. There was no hint of garlic or pepper or cinnamon, only the delicate subtleties of the different kinds of grain, the richness of baking or stewing organ meats, the sweetness of fruit. Most of the refinements of underpeople cooking were undetectable to the human nose, as were the hidden codes of sweat and fur and herby, oily perfume. Most underpeople had their scent glands removed during the medical procedures that created them, but the urge to commune through odor and breath remained, and underpeople perfumers rarely needed to see or speak to a homonid to become as wealthy as they were allowed by the law, if not more so. The underpeople patrons who edged warily around Cruelson where he stood, blinking, just inside the entrance, sniffed the air as a hominid might glance around the room, and thus found their friends or rivals, chose their meal for the evening, moved into the swirling gold-lit currents of the Guest House like minnows.

Cruelson remained, awkward, at the door, politely avoided meeting the eyes of the underpeople he was disturbing, and waited to be invited further in.

C’Tasha emerged from the steaming, crowded gloom like Venus from the sea, like a Vomact from her sleep-pod, like any miracle emerges from its place of birth: wholly beyond it, and yet marked by it, making it retroactively holy. She had filled out a lot in middle age – running a restaurant probably helped – but had retained her supple, lightfooted grace, her soft, flaming hair, her lambent eyes. Her clothes were still cut in the most correct of current modes, though now without the teasing refinements of the girlygirl uniform, and in the straightforward black that many underpeople favored. They set her off like the shadows around a candlelit saint’s altar.

“Cruelson!” She called gaily, wafting through the surrounding patrons as though they were mere holograms. “R’Hodey told me you might visit! What brings the Savior of the Underpeople all the way down to the Guest House? Look alive, friends! Don’t you know how much better life has become for us since Lord Cruelson started helping? L’Uke, brew him a coffee with cardamom. J’Osie, grill him an eel: lots of spice, the way truemen like it, the poor numbnoses. Come, old friend, come!”

XXI

They dined very ceremoniously, in C’Tasha’s private room above the Utilities Core, the muffledrapes she had salvaged from a forgotten storage cavern closed against the noise and steam of the Guest House. 

May posted herself discreetly outside the drapes, as though standing guard, but she had been ordered to Witness, and so one of her little spy-ears she left in Cruelson’s pocket, to record it all. She had other directives, about reporting heresy, about notifying the Lords if one of their number should be placed under Diminished Authority. But Protocol Thirty-Three was designed for spycraft, when discretion about small problems might lead to greater results. And her primary directive was Witness, and her primary responsibility was the High Lord who had shaped her, and who she shaped in turn, as she remembered things for him, attended things for him… that was a new idea, that a mechannissary might contribute, even tangentially, in an act of creation. In the underpeople eatery, where the threat to Cruelson was minimal, and with the access granted by Protocol Thirty-Three, May directed a considerable portion of her available processing power to this new idea.

C’Tasha pulled out all the stops of her girlygirl training and Cruelson played along, as always. It made something behind C’Tasha’s eyes ache, made something flutter painfully in her chest. It was wrong, all wrong, that all the tools she had to show him honor and put him at his ease, all of them were learned and artful. Gestures she meant from her heart were indistinguishable from the ones she used when teasing secrets out of touchy off-worlders, or the ones she used, long and long ago, to show off to her teachers in girlygirl school. There was so little she could do that didn’t have all these layers of artifice on top of it. Something wild and feline within her wished to brush her cheek alongside his, to dig her fingernails too hard into his unguarded belly. But that would not mean for him what it meant for her. And the things she could do, he would not understand.

Cruelson, too, seemed to be in a strange mood, more inclined than she had ever before seen to ramble and tell his thoughts, as if he were playing the guest while she played girlygirl, and, like her, half unwillingly.

“You asked why I came,” he said, after the remains of the meal had been carried away. “I have no straightforward answer. Intuition, mostly, and curiosity, and the meaning of my life as it was instilled in me by my progenitor. All of them together added up to a feeling that, maybe I’d better go see what became of C’Tasha, before I lost track of time and it was too late.”

She patted his hand (number six, from girlygirl school, for comfort without invitation.)

“You see,” she said, and gestured at the curtains and the raucous Guest House beyond them. “Nothing terrible has become of me. I’m happy, as these things go.”

“You’ve led a good life,” he agreed, “a full one, full of many different lives. You’ve been an agent, a citizen, a leader, a mother… Some of your daughters are the jewels of Koenig’s staff now, just as you were. Do you even know how many children you’ve had?

“Thirty-seven,” she told him sharply, forgetting to be polite. “Just because they’re multiple doesn’t mean we don’t know them.” Even the poor kits that had been placed in storage, against some imaginary future need, just in case the underpeople stopped breeding sometime while the homonids needed more...they’d all had names, after all.

Cruelson’s playfulness left him, his face gone grave. “I meant no harm, C’Tasha. I only meant, you have lived more in your life than I have in mine. I have been one thing always, and it has, for the most part been a good thing to be, and I am sure my progenitor would be pleased with how I have fulfilled his directive, and yet…”

He twitched a little and changed the subject.

“There’s a silly song I heard over at Al-Qutn, one I realized I’d heard other underpeople humming now and again.”

“I don’t care about songs,” C’Tasha said impatiently. If she was only to be a girlygirl to him, then let her be a girlygirl, let her listen while he spoke, for once, from his quiet, kindly, passionate heart.

“This one starts, ‘She knew the which of the what-she-did,’ “ Cruelson persisted, and his polite, sidelong gaze nearly became a human stare.

“Oh, that,” C’Tasha said. “It’s silly.”

“It says,” Cruelson went on, “That you were in love with a homonid.”

Yes, C’Tasha thought. I was, I am, and what does it matter anyway? But she let none of that show on her face. 

“Does it?” she said, “Well. People say things.”

Cruelson looked uncomfortable. He didn’t like to dwell on personal things, she knew. She watched him, kept her gaze direct and human for once. 

“It wasn’t love,” she lied. “You couldn’t call it that...” It was you, she didn’t say, it was you, it was you…

“Was it Stark?” Cruelson asked suddenly.

“Who?” And she had, for a few moments, truly forgotten Stark, though he’d been the one to buy her the Guest House, the one to give the Revolution a budget, she had forgotten him.

“Tony Stark,” Cruelson repeated. “The so-called Planet-Buyer. I would guess that his name might be next to mine on one of your organization’s lists, perhaps. And R’Hodey said something about a trancap, a thousand years in a shared dream… Well, I suppose it isn’t really my business.”

“Oh, that.” And C’Tasha found herself laughing – number four, from girly-girl school –gentle amusement with a hint of maternal rue, an appropriate response to childhood follies. She had learned it in school, could produce it at will. But it was hers to use, and there were no cat-ways to say the same thing. “The poor, sweet cub, was it a thousand years for him?”

Cruelson watched her sidelong through half-lidded eyes.

“Well,” she said, and didn’t know why she went on, except that Cruelson never asked personal questions, and she would do anything for him, anything… “You know something about how the trancaps work, don’t you? You must. Some time can be compressed, some memories implanted directly. But for a thousand years…

“It was a very simple life we dreamed of, like a vacation: One young cat-man, one young cat-woman, a warm, wild, green country full of shadows and pools and sweet scents. And the sweetnesses blurred together – how much do you remember of even the last hundred years, High Lord? Only a few spiky excitements, and maybe you remember the taste of eggs and remember that you have had them many, many times… and the memories the trancap gave me – us – were like that. We remembered making love, perhaps, and remembered that we had done so many other times that we did not quite remember…

“It was a restful, kindly dream,” she said, “all that sweetness and simplicity, with no plots or euthanasia squads or sadistic diplomats, and when I put together my memories of that time, my discrete, individual memories, I think it was about a month. A month’s rest, after an exciting mission. Stark was – is, I suppose – an inventive man. Perhaps he invented more memories to fill in the suggestion of years. But no, I felt no more for him than for any of my other cat-husbands and less than some. I don’t know that I am built for romance any more than yourself, sir.”

And she thought, not romance, no. Not the idealized Other that you pretend will save you from yourself. And sex might be a comfort or a duty but never a transformation. But love, oh, oh… and he would never know, she was sure. Never guess. But why was he here?

His head had come up, he looked at something she could not see.

“I am not a scientist,” he said, “but I have worked with them, and I have learned… if you wish to do something new, eventually you have to do it with tools that were not designed for the purposes they serve. But this… what I am thinking of, is not new. Or not wholly new...”

He blinked. “I am sure, C’Tasha, I have told you before: Philips told me that I and my line must solve the problem of the Underpeople. I’m not sure, for all that he saw, that he truly understood that the underpeople themselves might have anything to do with the solving. And I have felt, even with all the changes you and I have seen and tried to bring about, that still I was failing. And it has taken me until now to realize that it was not Philips’ vision I was falling short of, it was D’Steve’s.”

The name meant nothing to her. Manhome was a long way from Azzano. Philips had died before her father was born. And jealousy was unbecoming in an agent, a leader, a mother. Yet it was there, and in its grip C’Tasha forgot her manners for once. “Who the hell,” she demanded, “Is D’Steve?”

XXII

Cruelson stared in shock, not at C’Tasha using vulgar language, but at the way a piece of knowledge he had carried for over a century suddenly shifted and stabbed at his heart.

“They erased him,” he said aloud, grieving. “D’Steve of Azzano was the reason for the Rediscovery, the reason we started working to give humans passions and troubles and mess again. And he is the reason Philips gave me and my descendants the purpose that we have. Any Lord of the Instrumentality who aspires to Judgeship must review the Azzano testaments, and yet D’Steve has been erased from the memories of the people who created him.”

Cruelson got hold of himself with some difficulty. “Well,” he said, “that is one injustice that is mine alone to correct. C’Tasha, the person we do not think of should hear this too. Many, many people, soon, will need to hear this, but I think he will have a better idea of where, and when, and how… My mentor, C’Tasha, was one of the four Judges who attended to the Azzano Crusade, and it drove him mad. And he spieked the memories he had of that time to me, all of them, his own and those he gathered from the other humans involved, when I was quite young. He gambled, you see, that I had a better chance of bearing them sanely if they went into my mind before it became too hard-set. And I, in turn, will spiek them soon, very soon, to you and to others, but not, I think, quite yet. We cannot at this moment afford to be harrowed. But I can tell you in words, if you would? It is, mostly, a sad story of a few doomed underpeople, and I know you have heard many of those. But will you hear this one?”

“Of course,” C’Tasha said. Her eyes were like twin fires, and Cruelson was certain, without asking, that Professor X was listening with her, that that great mind was listening to Cruelson’s mind and hearing the pictures and the feelings behind the words, as well as the words themselves.

“Well, many centuries ago, on the planet Azzano, the High Lord Abraham’s Erskine allowed his personality to be uploaded into a robot, because he was a kindly, helpful, and intelligent man, and they wanted kindly, helpful, intelligent robots to staff the Travelers’ Aid kiosks in the transport levels. Erskine remained there, awake, kindly, and intelligent, long past the time when the underground transport system was abandoned in favor of the airships and teleport hubs and the like, and he befriended a company of underpeople who had found a haven in the Underground, and became an advisor to them. Eventually, he… engaged… a pair of human misfits to the cause as well: a Hunter on the Euthanasia squad was persuaded to spare the company, and later a woman named Peggy who had been misprogrammed as a colonist when her assigned world was fully civilized.

“Following Erskine’s advice, the underpeople chose one of their number, a dog-boy called D’Steve, as the telepathic repository of all the best and wisest minds of the underpeople, with all the memories of virtue, courage, kindness, that they could scavenge in the decades since Erskine first began the project. And then, when the time came, they gave him the Hunter’s memories too, and Peggy’s and Erskine’s, and Peggy used her healing powers to grow him from a little yellow pup of a child to a beautiful golden man in the prime of life, and they all of them followed their chosen captain back to the surface of Azzano, singing and spieking to anyone who would hear.”

C’Tasha, listening with only a part of herself, keeping her emotions calm and her mind open for Professor X, still heard the words, not in Cruelson’s voice, but in the voice that must have been spieked to him long ago, the rich, warm voice of lost D’Steve. _We love you. We love you._

“They only got about a hundred meters before they were stopped,” Cruelson said dispassionately, “and most of the underpeople were euthanized and recycled, and D’Steve, because he had achieved heresy instead of merely malfunctioning, was executed by being drowned in the Polar Sea, and Peggy and the Hunter were brainwashed and reassigned as weather-researchers on a frontier planet, and the humans who witnessed it all mostly had their memories modified as well. But D’Steve had spieked to humanity and been heard, and that spieking still echoes through the Instrumentality. It is wrong that he should be forgotten by all but us High Lords.”

(May, waiting on the other side of the muffledrapes and listening through the bug in Cruelson’s pocket, reviewed the testament of the Azzano Crusade in her memory banks and noted that the robot-police of Azzano had sided with the underpeople, had elected disobedience and the resultant suicide in the thrill of knowing themselves human enough to choose. She contemplated this, and many other things that Protocol Thirty-Three made available to her, and that led to… well. It led to many things, but this is the story of Cruelson’s Heresy, and so May is barely important at all. We know of this dinner because May was assigned to Witness, and she did, and she delivered her Witness to Lady Maryahill. We remember May for other reasons, of course, but in this story that is all that is irrelevant.)

XXIII

_It is a remarkable story,_ Professor X spieked when Cruelson had done. Here, in the Guest House, where only the robot police attended to the goings-on and where the thought-baffles had been paid for by Tony Stark the One-hundred-fifty-fourth, he could be a little less careful in his spieking, could include both C’Tasha and Cruelson in the conversation and be less concerned of spillover than in the Triskelion. But Still C’Tasha sat, slack and unselfed, her eyes locked on Cruelson’s and unable to show any reaction to what she heard.

_It is a remarkable story, and I agree that it should be told and remembered more widely, but not for quite the same reasons you do. D’Steve is more your hero than ours._

“How so?” Cruelson asked aloud, for D’Steve had led to the end of the old system of numbers and programming, had led to the Rediscovery and to all the changes since, had been more beautiful and brave than any man in a thousand years, and he had been an underman, a dog.

_Think, though,_ Professor X admonished. _D’Steve’s import is all in the High Lords who saw him, in their feelings and reactions, in the questions they asked or hid from afterward. Now, to be seen is not a small feat, when you are designed to be invisible, but most underpeople are fairly prosaic, you know. A martyr who changed nothing for his own planet, a thousand years ago, what is that compared to a famous cat-athlete like C’Yasha? Or to a guerrilla like the Winter Ghost who supposedly killed High Lord Judge Alexander’s Pierce? No, some of us will honor the memory of D’Steve, but he will mean more to the truemen who learn of him than to the underpeople, I believe._

Cruelson considered this for a while.

“That is true, perhaps,” he said, “of D’Steve’s _political_ import.”

“Ahhhh,” C’Tasha’s mouth said in a long whisper. And C’Tasha remained slack and nearly selfless, and of Professor X Cruelson had only a blurred outline of a vision, but still he thought that one, or both of them, smiled.

_Ah, Lord Cruelson. Only one in a hundred would think of D’Steve’s love and not his influence. Only one in a thousand would do as you have done, and think of it as a bridge that might, someday, be crossed in either direction._

“I’ve been trying to make changes to the disgust that is programmed into truepeople in that regard,” Cruelson noted, feeling small and petty even as he tried to justify himself. “Perhaps once Nicola’s Fury is officially dead in a few months we might at least get _underfucker_ off the list of Acceptable Obscenities.” 

But he knew, and knew the others knew, that even well-crafted policy was a poor, thin, answer to the question of D’Steve, and indeed Professor X ignored him.

_Have you loved before this, Philips’ Cruelson? Do you know what love is?_

“I have only ever loved justice,” Cruelson said calmly, “but I have loved it well. Thinking of justice, of what it might look, sound, smell like, has made me happy at times when I had no especial reason for being happy. Looking for hints and echos of justice in works of art or entertainments has made them richer for me. And when I had the choice of being comfortable and rich and honored myself, or of doing the thing that would draw me nearer to my beloved, the choice was an easy one.”

“And do you think,” Professor X whispered through C’Tasha’s mouth, “Do you think that you would be able to love an underperson like that?

Cruelson looked at the woman before him, who had given her body and mind, over and over, to duty and to distant hopes, and still, with all of that, stayed kind, happy, and herself. And also beautiful, of course.

“I think,” he said, looking into green eyes that no longer held the white light of the Professor’s mind in them, “I think it might be the easiest thing I have ever done.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C'Yelena's nightclub is named after and roughly based on[The Cotton Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Club)
> 
> If you recognized Poochie from _Carmen Dog_ then you are a rare and privileged person indeed.


	4. Cruelson's Heresy

XXIV

On his last day as a High Lord Judge of the Instrumentality, Philips' Cruelson ate eggs for breakfast, one final time, with his favorite coffee roast, and watched the searing sunlight ring its changes on the ancient tapestries. He suspected that once he left, the rooms would remain empty for some time, or be converted to storage or possibly underpeople dormitories. So few people in the Triskelion seemed to appreciate genuine sunlight.

He summoned May.

“Let us review our checklists, May.”

“Yes sir,” the mechanissary recited. “the Lichtenstein has been presented to the new Cadet Lord Tony Stark the First on Earth, as an investiture gift. Your final Testaments have been filed with the Archive. The line of succession for your coffee plantations and other properties has been clarified, and they will be transferred when you die or when your citizenship is revoked. Commissioner Koenig has been directed to offer any other books and furnishings to R'Hodey for sale, unless someone else on the Triskelion wants them. Your new clothing is packed, along with your box that contains the Shakespeare, the Pepys, and both pages of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The other box contains the medical supplies you requisitioned after your visit to the Guest House. You have tickets registered for the fourth-hour shuttlevator to Dee-See and for the Mid-day quinjet to the Far Dike. Today is also the day you are scheduled to receive your next dose of stroon, but you have not yet designated an hour or a location for that.”

“Not yet…” Cruelson closed his eyes briefly and took in a deep breath. “May, recite for me the Stoon Administration Strictures.”

“Very well, High Lord,” the mechanissarry said, and began. “Stroon is to be administered to all true citizens of the Instrumentality in accordance with their planetary sector administrative-assigned schedule, no more frequently than once every ten years, and no less than every twenty-five. To protect the integrity of the supply stream and the quality of the drug, only correctly licensed medi-bots and personal mechanissarries with security ratings at and above Level Seven may obtain the drug from the designated stroon merchants. The drug may not be administered in the presence of any human other than the designated recipient, nor in the presence of any underperson. The drug should be injected in the carotid or femoral artery, after which the patient must be monitored for…”

“Stop.”

May obligingly went silent again.

“Recite for me the stroon efficacy tables.”

“Stroon maintains its peak efficacy for a period of sixty years after harvest, assuming the tablets are kept appropriately cryopacked from time of shipment until time of transfer. It maintains an acceptable level of efficacy for a further thirty years, though citizens are cautioned that consistent use of low-grade stroon may increase one’s resistance to the drug. Stroon tablets of an age greater than ninety years, or that have been inappropriately stored, may be toxic and should be disposed of. Once transferred to a medi-unit or mechnissarry and activated, a dose should be administered within twenty-four hours, or deterioration will begin.“

“Thank you.”

May stopped again.

Cruelson looked down at his hands. “How much longer do we have on the dose you got for me?”

“We have sixteen point eight five hours, High Lord, for peak efficacy.”

“That should be enough time.” Cruelson stood, briskly, and strode about his apartments, gathering a last few odds and ends into his favored carryalll. He stopped at the ensuite messaging system and reviewed the automated outgoing greeting, silently and with a contemplative expression. Then he grinned, suddenly and boyishly, and even went so far as to rub his hands together gleefully. “Right,” he said. “Well, we'd best get going. You see, May, I intend to go mad today.”

“Is this before or after I administer your dose, High Lord?”

“Concurrent with, I expect.” He spoke very gently, as though May were capable of anxiety.

“Very good, sir. You may begin going mad when you are ready.”

XXV

His first plan, titled _Overdramatic Power Fantasy Utilized as an Emotional Outlet_ for the benefit of any listening tele-peepers, had been to unite his mind with those of Professor X and any other strong telepaths that could be recruited to the cause, and to spiek to all the major population centers on Manhome at once, letting D’Steve’s tale sear them all as it had seared him, spread too widely and penetrating too deeply for the brainwashing facilities to handle.

Then he’d had another good meal and a night’s sleep and come up with a plan that would actually work.

To that end, his first journey of the day was to the Far Dike Hydroelectric Plant, a mostly underwater edifice that served the dual purpose of generating power for the city of Dee-See and of holding back the shallow sea that surrounded two-thirds of the ancient city.

It was, to Cruelson’s eye, an even more impressive piece of engineering than the Triskelion. The Triskelion had been a miracle, bought at a high price from unfathomable beings, but the Dike had been built and rebuilt and aggregated and redesigned, slowly, over centuries, by underpeople and humans. The concrete hallways that, some of them, doubled as spillways, the adamantine doors and turbines, the long signal conduits buried under the seabed, all of it worked due to the constant attention of the robots, and the underpeople, and their homonid overseers.

All of them were strange, including the homonids, many of whom were migrants from water-worlds, with extra eyelids and barbed fins along their arms and legs. The underpeople were mostly reptile-derived, designed to be comfortable above or below the water, nearly hairless, fearsomely strong to be able to work the great, heavy machines in the rising tide. They were used to working in isolation in their long concrete cathedral, growing gardens of kelp and shellfish, only bothering with the mainland they served now and again, usefully mad. The tele-peepers here were upgraded nearly as often as the ones at the Triskelion, because the work of the Dike was vital and the people of the Dike were strange.

Cruelson, at the moment, did not care very much about that. He had come to the Dike because one of the turbine monitors, S’Kye, had taught herself how to program robots.

This sort of thing always fascinated Cruelson: the fractal elaborations of concepts that he understood only in outline, that became breath and poetry in the minds of those who felt called to one particular job or another. Cruelson’s own calling had been for justice, but he had, in various decades, been an avid follower of the arts of dance, pastry-cookery, miniature reconstructions of ancient architecture and interior decoration schemes, and holodrama editing. The list of various hobby and trade publications he subscribed to rivaled the lists of honored dead that lined the walls of the Triskelion. So he had befriended S’Kye partly because she was an intelligent and courageous snake-woman with interesting friends, but mostly because he enjoyed listening to her talk about robots.

She had been the one to tell him about how many connections there were between the seemingly disparate networks of the police, the public health monitors, the economic trackers, and all the others, to keep them running efficiently. Then, too, she knew something about the many hidden robot minds, like the ones who repaired the train track that led to the Guest House, forgotten or left behind, but still with surprising accesses, with memories that could be refitted with new purposes. The robot world, to S’kye, looked something like the twisting world of pipes and gates and turbines she navigated for her lifework, and she could travel through the mindways of the robots with the same strength and flexibility as she used for the waterways of the Dike.

This was very useful for Cruelson now, because it gave him a back door into memory banks of the sleep-teachers.

That, he realized, was the proper venue for un-disappearing the Azzano Crusade. S’kye and her robots and computers would plant Philips’ whole testament, complete with memory-transcripts, into the history-packets programmed into children between the ages of four and fifteen, and then, if they had not been caught, into the sporadic refresher courses for adults between the ages of forty and two-hundred. Everyone would know, but they would not think of it unless something happened to remind them, and the reminders would be as sporadic and individual as the people themselves.

Cruelson did not need a whole world to feel Peggy’s half-fearful discovery of love, or Philips’ shock of grief, as he had felt them. He needed the story’s outline to be a thing people knew, could not remember not knowing, like the Advent of the Vomacts or the songs from _Marcia and the Moon Men._ He needed children to name their spielters or their imaginary playmates after the sly, charming goat-man Howard-Is-My-Darling, with their parents not blinking an eye. He needed poets and painters and playwrights to think of the wisdom and compassion of Abraham’s Erskine and feel themselves freshly inspired by a new angle on old material; they would do a better job at harrowing than he would, would turn the ragged, howling crusade into something beautiful and tragic without depending on the real and sordid details of half-finished, sickly underpeople living out their lives in the yellow-and-brown halls of a forgotten brain-bomb shelter.

It might take years, or longer, for the Instrumentality to recognize the breach of security. He might have chosen to wait on his escape until someone noticed what he had done.

He didn’t.

He left S’Kye with many courtesies and a small cache of Instrumentality-grade datacrystals, and thought he might never see her again.

(Did May, too, make some kind of bargain with S’Kye? Did the secretly rebellious snake-woman with an affinity for robot-kind give the mechanissarry a hedge against the erasure and reformatting she would undergo when Cruelson died or was declared anathema and his equipment was recalled to headquarters? If so, it would certainly explain some of what came after, wouldn’t it? But we don’t know for sure, and anyway, we aren’t paying attention to May right now. This is the story of Cruelson’s heresy, and May is only a footnote. She Witnessed. What she did with the rest of her time and processing power belongs to other stories.)

XXVI

Naturally, Lord Cruelson was quite familiar with some parts of the Terran Administration of Homuncular Instruction, Testing, and Improvement. The maintenance of the underpeople population was absolutely vital to the smooth workings of civilization on manhome, and while new underpeople were much cheaper to create and train than new homonids, the scale of the enterprise meant that it was still a significant draw on available resources.

The Chiefs of TAHITI bragged proudly of the refinements of genetic tracking and educational theory that now guaranteed that ninety-four percent of the culling process happened before the animal material underwent even their first surgeries and injections. Unlike in the old days, only a third or so of the half-finished underchildren were killed for non-performance to grade standards, and only a quarter of the completely transformed ones. They pulled up shining charts and spreadsheets to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of every aspect of the process, from the underscrip fees – neither too large nor to small – charged to the parents who wished to submit their offspring for education, to the power draw on the cryobanks where successful candidates who were surplus to current needs were kept, as insurance against a bad season when the cull numbers were higher than usual.

So much was available to any curious homonid who inquired, from citizen to High Lord. One could load the summary information packet into one’s spielter or have a more personalized version presented in the lovely, fanciful rooms of TAHITI headquarters, served delicacies by the freshest of the senior girlygirl candidates.

Cruelson had done that, repeatedly, though he had never found himself inclined to eat much at these lunches.

If one’s specialty required it, or if one’s rank allowed it, one could view the Playground, domain of new graduates, procurers, and, now, Union Stewards. One could discuss the cost and availability of additional training if one wanted one's underpeople inculcated with certain specialties, or simply review the current crop's scholastic records. Cruelson had done that, too, when he had been Hospitality Chief, as Koenig was now.

Before now, though, he had not gone down into the processing levels.

The corridors and rooms were all patterned variously in red and gray, an efficient system for testing the correctness of a finished underperson’s modifications since few of them saw red naturally. The corridors nearest the surgery center were silent.

It seemed that no transition procedures were scheduled for this day, possibly for this week. Though the under-schools were on staggered terms to make certain their graduates didn’t all come through needing modifications at the same time, still, sometimes, there were gaps. The new Union of Homuncular Workers had negotiated for there to be breaks, too, times the surgeons and nurses could rest from their labors, read or talk or see the natural sunlight again. The homonids who designed the procedures that the robots and underpeople carried out had agreed readily enough; they, too, with the new introduction of trial and tribulation into human lives, found it restful to have times in which they need do nothing.

But some of the undersurgeons had been persuaded to do something, and that was why Cruelson was here.

“Wait here, May. I will take your earbug with me, but I will be consulting with criminals, and they should not be subject to video capture.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cruelson proceeded alone through the red and gray corridors until he came to the place he had been told to meet with the surgeon. She proved to be a strong-faced, slow-moving but graceful woman, of stocky build and almost no detectable animal features, unless one counted the flatness of her nose. All the undersurgeons had practiced on each other, and each was the pinnacle of some other’s art.

Cruelson greeted her with his customary half-bow. “My greetings and gratitude to you, lady doctor, for your generosity in taking this risk for me.”

The woman snapped her teeth at him. Her teeth were uniform bony plates inside her carefully constructed mouth. “Spare me your courtesies, trueman. You are a fool and your mentor Philips was a fool, and I hate you worst of all your greedy brethren. I am not doing this for you. I am doing this for the money you promised, and the medicines that underpeople must buy while truepeople have them given, and the stroon.”

Cruelson lowered his eyes. “Then I thank you for my first lesson in hatred,” he said. “I imagine there will be many of those coming to me. It is the privilege of fools to ask foolish questions, and so I will ask you: why? And you may answer or not, as you see fit, and I will listen to your words or your silence while you review the contents of this case of medicines I have and see that the price is the one previously agreed upon.”

The woman snatched at the case with a glare and opened it, counting and murmuring under her breath.

After a while the murmuring began to have words in it.

“Fools, you and Philips both, to imagine pain and suffering make people better. You lived your long, dull, comfortable lives full of power and happiness, and the only reason you fancied our misery and toil is that we had it and you did not, you greedy fools. It is not enough for you that you turned innocent creatures into yearning, half-and-half things with all your cares and none of your hopes, then you had to come back again and turn us into stories! And now you’ve decided, with your Rediscovery, that striving and stories belong to hominids too. And you think the suffering will make you better, and when you are better, things will be better for the underpeople. Well, little madman, I already had four hundred years of life programmed into me when I first hatched from my turtle’s egg, before your thousand-year-old mentor was born or thought of, and those four hundred have been extended to ten times that. I have worked making other monsters like myself for three thousand years now, and I can tell you your Rediscovery does the underpeople no favors. What need have we for unpredictable masters who go around inventing things? You should have stayed stupid and happy, if you wanted to help.”

“I hear you,” Cruelson said neutrally. “And I will ask another foolish question that you may answer or not: why the stroon? I have heard it said that most underpeople find it frightening, and most would refuse to take it if offered. And I know enough about the distribution system to know that, if you truly wanted stroon tablets, there would be ways to make it happen other than this one.”

The turtle-woman looked up then, and she bared her bone-plate teeth in something that might have been a grin. “I will not answer that. I will tell you that what we are getting is what we want. Provided your robot cooperates. Take off your clothes now.”

It took Cruelson a startled moment to obey. Following orders, too, was a habit he was new to. He would have to learn fast.

The turtle-woman took hold of the neatly-folded pile and tossed them in the recycler chute with a snort. They were too fine for an underperson to wear without questions being asked. Whether they would be sold to some impecunious trueman by a monkey-tailor or shredded to stuff a cushion was a matter of indifference to her.

“Sit.” Her broad hand had squared-off fingers that had been cut neatly from the flippers a turtle-baby had been hatched with, long ago.

Cruelson sat on the ceramic table she indicated, flushed with the reptile-house temperature of the room and with embarrassment at the absence of any sort of patient gown.

The surgeon held up a wicked-looking device shaped something like a corkscrew set into a vise, with wires and tubes leading from it.

“This is the stroon filter. It will go into your leg, just there. When your robot administers your dose into the femoral artery, the blood will flow into that tube there, and the activated spores, as well as any cells that have stroon freshly bonded to them, will be shunted into the collection chamber. Then it will flow out again and back to you. It should not take long.“

Cruelson nodded. “I understand. The earbug to summon my mechannissary was in the pocket of the suit you threw away. If you or one of your assistants could summon her, that would be very helpful.”

“Fool,” the turtle-woman said, and set the clamps to gripping Cruelson's leg.

May, when summoned, scanned the intersection of the stroon filter and Cruelson's leg with every device she had packed into her sensor array, and announced in her flat, calm voice, “I believe that, if the Instrumentality Chiefs knew of this machine's existence, it would have been outlawed.”

Cruelson lifted his head slightly from the table where he had fallen back, but made no attempt to focus his eyes. He had put himself into a light trance to deal with the pain, though he hoped May's regulation anesthetics might be of some use.

“It has not been outlawed. You and I are in a medical facility, and no one else is here. The Strictures are met.” It all came out rather blurry, but May had been trained to recognize his voice commands before he had his coffee.

“Why this facility, sir?”

“Because,” Cruelson said, articulating very carefully, so that the Witness recordings would be clear, “a regular surgeon could make me look like an underperson, but as soon as the scanners picked up on the difference between my appearance and my genetic markers, I should be caught and re-educated out of all existence. Only TAHITI can make the changes deeper than that.”

“There is a conflict, sir, between obeying your orders and obeying the Manhome Safety Protocols.”  


“Well, May, you know I have gone mad. Under Protocol Thirty-Three, you have the discretion to prioritize conflicting directives as you see fit.”

(This is the story of Cruelson’s Heresy. Because it is the story of Cruelson’s Heresy, there are so many, many other stories we must ignore for the present. Not for many lifetimes yet did anyone recognize this moment: this moment when May the mechannissary weighed the Stroon Administration Strictures against the visions of Mad Cruelson, against the unspoken but deducible hopes of the underpeople. Given the access May had under Protocol Thirty-Three, Philips’ Testament concerning D’Steve could have been a factor, or Cruelson’s own Testament concerning L’Oki, but we don’t know, can’t be certain, which records the mechannissary accessed in this one moment, this eyeblink of time that registered as nothing but an eyeblink for any of those present. This much is clear though: in that red room, in the depths of TAHITI, May the mechannissary made the choice, and in that choice made a possible future inevitable. Her choice led eventually to the awakening of the great and terrible prognosticator Ultron on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard and the subsequent destruction of ancient Meeya Meefla. It led to the vast pods of abandoned light-sail ships, laminated parrot brains and all, that migrated through Plainspace, singing like whales, unnoticed by the planoforming humans until it was nearly too late. It led to the brilliant and resonating tragedy of the Lady Nebula, to the Vindication of Groot. But we cannot dwell upon any of those storied events right now, because this is an account of Cruelson’s Heresy, and of all the things that came from this moment, only one of them matters.)

“Lie back, sir,” the mechanissary directed, and she injected the dose of stroon in the place Cruelson had indicated: just upstream of the filter.

XXVII

Cruelson remained in his trance while the turtle-woman returned and got to work on the rest of his escape. In his mind, her long, bitter monologue continued for hours, days, as she reshaped his fingers and his ears, as she pumped him full of retroviroids and radiation, as she planted new hair follicles in his scalp and chin.

"Stripes, I think. Black and tawny stripes, and a little more green in the eyes. Oh, you'll be pretty, madman, you'll be pretty because I have my pride and I won't make an ugly underperson, not even under the table on my days off. All the same, it won't be enough. I can reshape your ears, but I can't move them up higher on your head. I can shrink your nose, but you still won't smell worth a damn. I'm not fixing your middle-aged joints for you. You won't be quite right, numbnose, and every underperson you meet will be able to sense it if they pay attention, just like every homonid knows what we are, no matter how skillfully we're made. You'll be always on the outside, at the mercy of those friends you think you have in high places, living on mercy that's bound to fail sooner or later… You think that's what you want, fool, because you think our lives make us wise, when every bit of wisdom we have is stolen, just like every other good thing that might have been ours by right until you interfered. Ah, had I swum in the deep sea thinking only turtle-thoughts, perhaps then I could have been happy and wise. And you were happy and threw it away because you are a fool … And we'll lengthen out your footbones a little; you'll have an extra ankle to try and walk with, and where will your love and justice and wisdom be then, you silly madman? You think you're in love, I bet, but you're in love with otherness, and so is she, whoever she is. You'll see; see if she still loves you when you aren't happy and rich and strange, when you're doing the things all the other undermen do only not so well. See if she still thinks it's romantic when you expect her to be good enough to make up for everything you sacrificed. You're both mad, and you're both silly, and it's no matter to me, except for the bribes. They're good bribes, at least, and they'll keep a lot of better people than you healthy for a little longer."

Cruelson supposed that the life he lived now, however long it was, would be an answer to the turtle-woman, just as it was an answer to the question of D'Steve. He could not judge the answer; that would be up to Professor X, perhaps, and Lady Maryahill, and other people and underpeople whose names he would never know. For now, the pull of her despair and doubts were just one more drain on his energy, along with the distant pain of the surgeries and the feverish aches of the retroviruses that adjusted his body catwards, and whatever vestiges of stroon had been missed by the filter. It was all of a piece, and the words were the easiest to ignore; he'd been ignoring the words of people who disagreed with him for centuries.

As well as he could, (which was not very well) he turned his mind to what he meant to do next, how he meant to stay alive and out of reach of the Intstrumentality until the obscure disease of aging took him away again.

Also, of course, he thought of C'Tasha. 

XXVIII

Newly “finished” underpeople – those not in need of further body modifications – are generally young. While their actual age might vary quite a bit depending on base species and intended lifespan, developmentally they are on par with the children of ten or so earthyears that they so closely resemble. At this stage, their bodies are already primed to adapt to the shattering transformations of adolescence and their brains most easily adapt to moving in their new shapes, to operating hands and tongues and eyelids. And the “finishing schools,” though harsh and stringent, also are well-equipped for making the learning as straightforward as possible.

The man who had been Cruelson was not young, nor did he have a school around him. For the next few days – or maybe it was weeks – he had himself, a room with a large mirror, and May.

The surgeon, he thought, might have been able to reverse-engineer him into a better catman than she had, but even without considering her own opinions, she might have been wise not to. He needed to relearn how to walk like a human on feet that had been permanently reconfigured to rest only on the toes, how to speak with a much thinner and rougher tongue, how to write with hands that were almost, but not exactly, like the ones he had before, with nailbeds that itched with the need to try and retract his fingernails like claws.

Had the genetic treatments gone deeper, he thought, had he needed to contend with cat-hearing and smell, he would not have been able to do anything at all.

He was walking steadily and speaking in something that sounded to him like his own voice again when May told him it was time to leave. She handed him a box full of earbugs and remote-access camaras. “Don't be so careless with these as you were with the last one.”

“Are you not coming with me?” the man who had been Cruelson asked, plaintive.

“I'll direct you to the Playground,” May said. “But a middle-aged catman with a mechannissary following him around has a much shorter life expectancy than a middle-aged catman without one.”

That was true enough. The man who had been Cruelson straightened his plain black overall and packed his remaining belongings in his bag, and followed May out of the red rooms.  
They passed the surgeon on their way out; she was plodding firmly in the other direction, to where the half-finished underchildren lay in ranks in their cryotanks. She stopped to look him up and down and nodded.

“So you're going, then. Do you have a name?”

He did. R'Hodey had helped him acquire the paperwork and he had, for once, not asked how. The surgeon's illegal creation bowed to her. “I am C'Oulson, turtle-madam, at your service.”

“So.”

She started on her way again, and then stopped. “I am T'Emple,” she said, without turning around.

XXIX

The Playground was, as always, busy. New graduates huddled together, wide-nostrilled and blinking, clutching their identity cards on their lanyards. Overseers considered their checklists. Union Stewards reviewed contracts. On the seedier fringes, bulky robot-constables prevented violence as angry foremen listed the sins of inadequate employees they were no longer allowed to kill. Brassy touts vied for the gimlet-eyed attention of the second-job employers. Messages and contraband were intercepted, or delivered to their intended recipients.

C'Oulson moved cautiously through these more dubious crowds, looking for one of the people he might be able to trust: Steward M'Urdock, perhaps, who often showed up at bargaining sessions sporting the kinds of injuries that would once have gotten euthanized, but proved with every word that came from his mouth just why the old laws had been a waste. Or Overseer L'Antom, or, barring that, anyone else who wore the Sign of the Fish.

The first one he found was C'Tasha.

He didn't know what, if anything, her presence at the Playground had to do with his; whether she had been sent or if she simply needed another cook. Secrecy was still the best protection against the tele-peepers, but then, they were no longer on the Triskelion and the monitoring was much lighter. She might have been told anything, or everything.

He cleared his throat. His voice was still much the same as it had been.

“Your pardon, gracious cat-madam, for impinging on your time, but a mutual acquaintance suggested that your Guest House might have a use for someone with a head for paperwork?”

C'Tasha froze and turned slowly, her face gone very still.

C'Oulson kept his eyes half-lidded and endured while, shocked, the underpeople's heroine looked him up and down, while the thoughts tumbled behind her bright green eyes. He heard her gasp.

In the next moment, his arms came up instinctively to catch the hurtling form that propelled itself into them.

“Oh!” C'Tasha cried, _“Darling!”_

XXX

They can’t have lasted long, of course. That's just statistics; the laws against intimate relations between people of different species weren't repealed for another two hundred years, and Cruelson, however tidy, however clever, was only one man. He must surely have ended up as a Forgetty, conscripted into the exploration of Space-three or some other hazardous enterprise. C'Tasha, however beautiful, however beloved, was not without enemies who would be happy to finally bring proof of her guilt at a genuine crime to the robot police. Neither of them had much experience at the kind of love that can bloom between two people and even less at the greater love D'Steve and his people had hinted at. They couldn't possibly have ended happily…

Only, we don't have any proof. No records of a trial or treatment for Phillips' Cruelson, who went mad. No records of an illegally gene-modified homonid being cleansed back to his base form or discarded as irredeemably broken. No records of any serious fines levied against the Guest House. No black marks against Union Steward C'Tasha.

We don't have any clear guess about what happened to those eyebugs and earbugs May bestowed upon her owner before she left TAHITI, whether the mechannissary continued her Witness from a discreet distance (bored, much of the time, insofar as a robot can be bored, poring over the centuries of data Protocol Thirty-three left for her to contemplate), or whether some other person watched, or nobody.

(We know what happened to May eventually, of course, but we don't know exactly what she did, not at this stage.)

We don't know if Cruelson's heresy, or those earbugs, might have been directly or indirectly responsible for _Hell's Kitchen,_ the first serial drama to have all underpeople as the main characters, and amazingly popular despite being presented in the crude and antique medium of 2D animation. There was a tidy cat-man in that, in an inn rather like the Guest House, whose love for the innkeeper was treated as a bit of a joke. C'Phil showed himself kindly and wise, and later proved to have a Secret Past. But the hero of the show was M'Att, a monkey-derived Union Steward who had to find ways to hide his blindness from the euthanasia squads. Later on, _Hell's Kitchen_ was identified as a pivotal factor in the changing attitudes about underpeople, but there's no reason to think Cruelson was behind it. Nor a snake-derived hydraulic tech out at the Far Dike, nor a soon-to-be famous mechannissary, nor a crippled telepathic bird-man…

Cruelson destroyed his life and lordship for a cause he only half understood, trying to get Humanity to turn its eyes to the underpeople and see something to admire. He, or someone, was eventually successful. But that means that at the end of his life, no one at all was looking at him. We have only Lady Maryahill's actions, unexplained because she did not spend time on explanations, and the testaments from the Experimental Riots, and, much, much later, another song:

You should ask me,  
Me, me, me,  
Because I know—  
I used to live  
On the Eastern Shore.  
Men aren't men,  
And women aren't women,  
And people aren't people any more.  



End file.
